Ágnes Györke, Élet és Irodalom 62.9 (2018)

Susan Rubin Suleiman, Research Professor at Harvard University, was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the autumn of 2017. She was interviewed by Ágnes Györke, former Fellow of IAS, about her extraordinary life, her research interests, and her political views. The interview offers a brief overview of her family’s escape from Budapest after the Second World War and her two returns to the city before and after the fall of communism, recorded in Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook . Professor Suleiman also talked about her recent book, The Némirovsky Question, which examines the novels of the Franco-Russian writer Irène Némirovsky and the question of Jewish identity. Topics such as everyday flânerie, the quest for origins, the current situation of gender studies, as well as the question of existential choice faced both by Némirovsky and István Szabó are explored in the interview, among many other issues.

The entire interview can be viewed in Hungarian for subscribers in the online edition of Élet és Irodalom.

Edited by Zsolt Czigányik, a former Humanities Initiative Fellow at IAS CEU, the book investigates the possibilities of cooperation between the humanities and the social sciences in the analysis of 20th century and contemporary utopian phenomena. The papers deal with major problems of interpreting utopias, the relationship of utopia and ideology, and the highly problematic issue as to whether utopia necessarily leads to dystopia. Besides reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary utopian investigations, the eleven essays written by leading experts of the field effectively represent the constructive attitudes of utopian thought, a feature that not only defines late 20th- and 21st-century utopianism, but is one of the primary reasons behind the rising importance of the topic.

The book is available at CEU Press.

Maria Rybakova, Writer in Residence at CEU Institute for Advanced Study in 2016/17 talks about her chance to explore the interlocking motifs of location and dislocation in Sándor Márai’s and her own life and work. 

Margery Amdur, artist-in-residence co-hosted by IAS and VSP in November-December 2015, talks about her experience as an artist-in-residence, the sources of inspiration for her art and the installation she created in one of the elevators at CEU.