GUSZTÁV BÁGER, poet and economist. He is professor emeritus at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. Between 1990 and 1992, he was the head of the Economic Policy Department of the Ministry of Finance, and in 1992, he became the head of the International Finance Department of the Ministry of Finance. From 2003, he was the director general of the Research Institute for the State Audit Office, then its scientific adviser. Between 2015 and 2020, he was a member of the Monetary Council of the Central Bank of Hungary. He received the prestigious József Attila literary prize for excellence in 2012.
JÁNOS CSÁK is a former Hungarian ambassador to the United Kingdom, honorary professor of management, and an investor. He served as chairman and chief executive of international oil and gas, investment banking, and telecom companies in Europe, North America, and Australia. His strategic advisory practice is focused on social and corporate futuring.
GERGELY EGEDY, historian and political scientist, university professor. He teaches at the newly founded National University of Public Service. He specializes in the history of political thought and British history. His major works include Nagy-Britannia története (A History of Great Britain, 1998, 2011); Konzervativizmus az ezredfordulón (Conservatism at the Turn of the Millennium, 2001); Brit konzervatív gondolkodás és politika (British Conservative Thought and Politics, 2005); Bevezetés a nemzetközi kapcsolatok elméletébe (An Introduction to the Theory of International Relations, 2007, 2011).
PÉTER ERDŐ, Cardinal, Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, the Primate of Hungary. Cardinal Erdő studied at the seminaries of Esztergom and Budapest, and the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, where he obtained a doctorate in both theology and canon law. On 18 June 1975, Erdő was ordained to the priesthood by Archbishop László Lékai, and was incardinated in the Archdiocese of Esztergom. He worked as parochial vicar in Dorog, and then continued his studies in Rome from 1977 to 1980. For the next eight years, he taught as a professor of theology and canon law at the Seminary of Esztergom, and gave guest lectures at several foreign universities. Erdő served in the Hungarian Episcopal Conference as Secretary of the Commission of Canon Law in 1986, and later as its president in 1999. In 1988 he began teaching theology at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, serving as rector from 1998 to 2003. Since 2005 he has been the great chancellor of the university. On 5 November 1999, he was appointed an auxiliary bishop of Székesfehérvár and titular bishop of Puppi. He received his episcopal consecration on 6 January 2000 from Pope John Paul II, with Archbishops Giovanni Battista Re and Marcello Zago, OMI, acting as co-consecrators. Erdő was named Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest on 7 December 2002 which carries the title of Primate of Hungary. Erdő became a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2007 and a full member in 2013. In 2011, he was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Navarra (Spain). He is fluent in Italian, French, and Latin.
LONNIE R. JOHNSON is native of Minnesota and graduate of St. John’s University, who has lived and worked in Vienna since an initial year of study abroad in Vienna in 1973–1974. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna, and is the author of books and articles on Viennese, Austrian, and Central European history—including the third revised edition of Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends (Oxford University Press: 2011)—and he has served as the executive director of the Fulbright Program in Austria since 1997.
BORIS KÁLNOKY grew up in Germany, the United States, Holland, and France. His family left Hungary in 1947. He studied politics and history in Hamburg and went on to work at the German daily Die Welt in 1987. In 1995, he became Balkans correspondent for Die Welt, based in Budapest, and moved on in 2004 to become Middle East correspondent, based in Istanbul. He is the author of Ahnenland (Munich: Droemer Verlag, 2011), a book about what had happened to his family and Hungary since 1952. He returned to Budapest in 2013, still working for Die Welt. He also writes for a number of other media organizations in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Since September 2020, he has been head of the Media School at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Budapest.
ZSOLT NÉMETH, founding member of Fidesz (Hungarian Civic Party) and member of Parliament since 1990. He studied political science at St Anthony’s College, Oxford University, as a visiting student in 1988 and 1989. He holds an MA in Economics and Sociology from Karl Marx (Corvinus) University of Economic Sciences, Budapest. Since 2014, he has been chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and head of the Hungarian Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly to the Council of Europe. He was chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee between 2002 and 2010, and parliamentary state secretary in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs from 1998 to 2002, then again between 2010 and 2014. In 2004, he was member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament for a year. He was one of the main sponsors of the Act on National and Ethnic Minorities (1993), which granted individual and collective rights and the right to self-government for ethnic and national minorities living in Hungary, as well as of the act allowing non-resident Hungarians to apply for Hungarian citizenship if they are of Hungarian origin and speak the language (2010). He is also a founder of the Pro Minoritate Foundation; honorary chief superintendent of the Calvinist Congregation of Transylvania; and member of the Knight’s Order of the Johannites.
CALUM T. M. NICHOLSON holds an undergraduate degree in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, a masters from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Human Geography. He is a former visiting fellow at the University of Oxford, and has also served as a researcher in the British Parliament. He is a specialist and consultant on climate migration, as well as on the historical significance of social media. He is currently teaching courses on international development, international migration, and the impact of social media at the University of Cambridge. He also writes and speaks on a wide range of social, political, and cultural issues for various outlets, including The Economic Standard, The New Humanist, and the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna.
JOHN O’SULLIVAN is editor-at-large of National Review in New York, where he served as editor-in-chief for ten years. He was a special adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, and later assisted her in the writing of her two volumes of memoirs. He has held a wide variety of senior editorial positions in the media on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the founder and co-chairman of the Atlantic Initiative, an international bipartisan organization dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies, launched at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by President Václav Havel and Margaret Thatcher. Until 2011, he was the executive editor of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague. Currently he is the president of the Danube Institute, Budapest, and an associate editor of Hungarian Review and Hungarian Conservative. His latest collection of essays, The Woke versus the West: Awkward Questions for a Progressive Age, was published in 2020.
NICHOLAS T. PARSONS is a freelance author, translator, and editor based in Vienna. A graduate of New College, Oxford. He spent two years in Italy teaching at the British Institute of Florence and as reader in English at the University of Pisa, before returning to the UK to work in publishing for ten years in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1984 he settled in Central Europe with his Hungarian wife, the art historian Ilona Sármány, and has since published some eighteen books on cultural topics, writing also as Louis James. These include the Blue Guide Austria and the Blue Guide Vienna as well as the first English guide to Hungary to be published following the regime change of 1989. His essay-length Xenophobe’s Guide to the Austrians (Louis James) has been in print for twenty years. His more recent books are Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide, Vienna: A Cultural and Literary History, and A New Devil’s Dictionary, which updates Ambrose Bierce’s satirical take on disingenuous language. In 2019 he published Civilisation and Its Malcontents: Essays on Our Times (Hungarian Review, 2019).
KATALIN RÓNA, journalist and editor. She graduated from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. During her career as a journalist, she was a theatre critic and editor of the weekly Film Színház Muzsika, then editor of the cultural column of the daily Magyar Nemzet. For fifteen years she was the head of communications for the National Office for the Protection of Monuments, and of its legal successors, the Office for the Protection of Cultural Heritage and the Forster Centre. Currently she is working as the architecture, monument protection and performing arts editor of the magazine Országút.
ÉVA ESZTER SZABÓ, historian, Americanist, and Latin Americanist, senior lecturer, and deputy head of the Department of American Studies, School of English and American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her courses and research have focused on inter-American relations, US immigration history and immigration policy, and global migration issues in global politics. Her most significant work is entitled US Foreign and Immigration Policies in the Caribbean Basin (Savaria University Press, 2007). Her recent research targets the history and current developments of a growing US American diaspora, and border studies.