Submitted Papers - 2017

Landscapes of Loneliness in Benedek Fliegauf’s Tejút

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Tejút (2007) or “Milky Way” (dir. Benedek Fliegauf) subtlety captures the essence of loneliness caused by the detachment between humans and nature. Framing the landscape is important in showing this disconnection and isolation. In this paper, I provide a synopsis of the film through a breakdown of the highlighted landscapes, explore the chronology, and interpret the further meaning of this disconnection and breakdown of society. In Tejút, humans must navigate the artificial world they have created for themselves and take with it the unsettling aspects of man-made life. This paper provides a new interpretation of a modern Hungarian film.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Kristen Csenkey is a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology at York University (Toronto) with graduate diplomas in German & European Studies and Refugee & Migration Studies. Her research focuses on political identities and nationalism among the Hungarian Diaspora in Canada. Csenkey is also interested in exploring issues of identity in Hungarian literature. She has founded a number of student organizations at the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs, organized conferences, and is involved in other aspects of Hungarian Studies research.

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Narrative Perspective on the Sites of Subjective Ethnicity

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
In this paper, I describe ethnic identity formation as a spatialized process tied to recognizable geographical locations—places that prompt ethnic activities or make the already existing practices memorable. I interpret four interview-based narratives within their discursive and narrative environment to discuss how storytellers relate to their subjective ethnicity against the backdrop of ethnically marked sites and locations. The four stories will highlight four modes of conceptualizing space related to ethnicity: 1) the ethnic neighborhood, 2) ethnic reclamation sites, 3) sites of heritage tourism, and 4) heterolocalism. I probe the space-centered stories in this conceptual matrix of ethnic geography to explore under which circumstances storytellers find ethnically imbued sites meaningful. I also reveal how narrators locate these sites as centers of cultural-social networking and thus a source of symbolic capital. Furthermore, the analysis pinpoints the ways in which investment becomes a necessary prerequisite to community formation and maintenance. I suggest that traditional ethnic identity sites as well as those newly designed cultural geographical formations rooted in the subjectivization of ethnicity gain long-term meaning and become sustainable if they are seen as an investment and their capacity to bring profits as symbolic capital.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Monika Fodor works as assistant professor in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Pécs. Her research interest includes narratives, identity, ethnicity, oral histories and ethnographic fieldwork. Since she has her degree in Applied Linguistics, she has also published in multidisciplinary fields such as teaching culture and narrative and translation studies. Most of her recent publications in English and Hungarian have been on exploring uncertainty and the complexity perspective in the context of assimilation and narrative identity construction. Her most recent work coedited with Eleftheria Arapogentitled “Mobile Narratives: Travel, Migration and Transculturation” that came out in the “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature” series of Routledge in 2014.

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The Transformation of Budapest Fashion and Retailing over a Century

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
Budapest from its beginnings in Buda around the early 19th century until the early 1950s. It aims to bring to light that even though today Budapest does not register as an important European fashion center, before World War II, its fashion consumption and retail scene were significant. The development of its fashion industry infrastructure and the fact that by the turn of the 20th century it was the fifth most recognized fashion city in Europe after Paris, London, Vienna and Berlin, was a crucial component of Hungary’s modernization process. This paper contends that Budapest’s fashion industry momentum was intended to demonstrate that Budapest was a true equal of Vienna, its co-capital in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that existed from 1867 to 1918. It also argues that Hungarian fashion deliberately followed French fashion to culturally and visually distance itself from Austria’s influence. It discusses how in this effort the Hungarian retail scene began to flourish from the 1910s onward and describes the critical retail institutions in Budapest that were mostly established by the Jewish minority. In closing, it addresses the ideological and economic reasons Budapest’s robust fashion scene disappeared after the Communist takeover of Hungary in 1948.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Katalin Medvedev is an Associate Professor in the Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Interiors at the University of Georgia, USA. Her articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Women’s Studies Quarterly, Fashion Practice, Dress, International Journal of Fashion Studies, Clothing Cultures, Paideusis-Journal for Interdisciplinary and Cross Cultural Studies, International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology, and Education, as well as in book chapters published by Berg, Fairchild, Pennsylvania University Press, Springer, Purdue University Press and University of Minnesota Press, among others. She is currently co-editing a book on Dress and Empowerment for Bloomsbury.

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Catholicism / Orthodoxy and Domestic Violence in Eastern European States

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
Eastern Europe’s religious historical perseverance has come into conflict with the changing role of women. Influence from the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Catholic Church have direct and indirect political influence in Eastern Europe. Strong influences still exist for the subjugation of women into family roles and fierce pressure from women’s organizations has caused a backlash from the political apparatus. This backlash exacerbates the inequality of women. I will do an in depth comparison of Hungary and other emerging democracies through the lens of international human rights norms. How will a country hold onto its identity while adapting to ever changing societal demands?

This paper will be a comparative study on domestic violence in Eastern European countries and their adherence to stated UN norms. I will look at the issue of gender identity, with an emphasis on religious influence towards societal behavior. This paper compares the compliance of Hungary with newer Eastern European states through the lens of domestic violence.




Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Martha (Marty) Pack is a Political Science graduate student at Northeastern Illinois University located in Chicago, IL. She graduated Suma Cum Laude with her bachelor’s in Communication/Production from NEIU in 2010. The majority of her undergrad was spent as a Women’ Studies major. Balancing her family and school life, she finished her program through a self directed degree, which led to human rights documentary film making. She would like to pursue her PhD researching women’s issues in Eastern Europe.

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Jews and Hungarians in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Hungarian Proverb Collections

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
Proverbs are concise formulations of folk wisdom and views, and as such, when seen in masses, they may well express the spirit of their time and place. In Hungarian proverbial lore Jews figure prominently in the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century collections but fade out of such collections as of the mid twentieth century. While still present in Hungarian proverb collections, Jews are invariably portrayed in them as dishonest, greedy, physically weak and unattractive. Largely, this portrayal as well as the dynamics of presence versus disappearance matches the shared history of Hungarians and Hungarian Jews since the 1867 Emancipation of the country's Jews, through their growing integration in significant arenas of their host society, up to their persecution and annihilation in the Holocaust, and later their decade long forced merging into the general Hungarian society by communism. This presentation traces the occurrence and disappearance of Jews in Hungarian proverb collections as well as analyzes the content and messages of proverbs about Jews in the collections. Finally, by way of presenting a possible counter corpus, it examines the Hungarian-Jewish sense of belonging to Hungarian society based on a few much humbler proverb corpora of former Hungarian Jews.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Ilana Rosen is a Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. She studies the folk and documentary literature of Diaspora Jews and of Israelis in the twentieth century and has devoted to these topics five books and over forty articles. Her last study, Pioneers in Practice, about the documentary literature of veteran residents of the Israeli south, was published in 2016. As of 2013, she is the Book Review Editor of Hungarian Cultural Studies, the AHEA E-Journal published by the University of Pittsburgh.

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Who Are We? Hungarian and Canadian Identifications in the Modern Era

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
1867. A year which had a considerable significance and life-changing consequences on the formation of national identity both for Canadians and Hungarians, too. The Canadian Confederation and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of the same year were turning points in Canada’s and Hungary’s respective histories and generated unique social, cultural, political, and economic destinies for their populations. They went on a long journey that created a nationally and culturally specific self-definition, which determined who they are today. Since then, Hungarians and Canadians continue to create spaces to exert their own particular agencies.
In my paper, I intend to provide a contrastive analysis of the long-lasting repercussions of these two transformative events on the evolution of the Hungarians and Canadians’ national collective identities. They all have a sense of who they are in relation to their larger communities, and based on race, ethnicity, religion, language, and culture, they distinguish themselves from other groups. By comparing the major Canadian and Hungarian historical and political developments since 1867, I seek to detect some similarities and differences between their identification processes in the modern era. In doing so, my ambition is to raise awareness, challenge and deconstruct some petrified stereotypes that define and box in the perception of nations.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
In 2006, she graduated as a teacher of English and French. Two years later, she received her MA degree in Canadian Studies. She was awarded a research grant in Toronto in 2008 and after that she engaged in teaching for seven years. She started her PhD studies in 2009 and since then she has published articles on Canadian Indigenous Literature, has taught preparatory courses, and has been attending international conferences. In 2012, she participated in the Thinking Canada Study Tour and did internships in Ottawa. She has done research in Brno, Bolzano, and Ottawa and is currently completing her doctoral studies.

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Béla Zsolt, the Last Chronicler of the Hungarian-Jewish Assimilated Bourgeoisie

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
Zsolt Béla, a leftist journalist and one of the most prolific writers of the interwar period, was as a typical coffeehouse figure (polgári kavéházi író), who today is known primarily for his Kilenc Koffer (1946), one of the very earliest memoirs of the Hungarian Holocaust. In this paper I focus rather on his literary works written between the mid-twenties and thirties, with particular emphasis on his only novella collection, Polgári házasság (1935), in the context of the sociocultural and political discourse in interwar Hungary. This collection, which has received no critical attention to date, illustrates all the themes that preoccupied Zsolt throughout his oeuvre, principally his pessimistic and merciless inside criticism of the empoverished Jewish petit bourgeoisie of Erzsébetváros as well as of the ridiculous pretensions of the upwardly mobile Jews who attempt to mimic the mores of a hostile semi-feudal gentile society. Ultimately, Zsolt’s work is centered in the tragic irony of the ideological illusions of assimilation, for which he foresaw a tragic outcome, as few others were able (or willing) to see.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Louise O. Vasvári is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and of Linguistics at Stony Brook University. Currently she teaches in the linguistics department at NYU and is also Affiliated Professor at the University of Szeged. She works in medieval studies, diachronic and socio-linguistics, Holocaust studies, and Hungarian Studies, all informed by gender theory within a broader framework of comparative cultural studies. She has recently published with Steven Tötösy, Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (2005), Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies (2009), and Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies (2011).

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