Publications

Warmest congratulations to former IAS Senior Core Fellow Mostafa Minawi on his new volume entitled: 'Losing Istanbul. Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire' (Stanford University Press, 2022) that has been written while he was a Fellow at IAS CEU in academic year 2020-2021. IAS CEU congratulates its alumnus Mostafa Minawi on his outstanding achievements.

IAS CEU is delighted to congratulate its 2019 alumna, former Botstiber Fellow Friederike Kind-Kovács on publishing her new monograph titled: Budapest's Children - Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great War, which was partly written during her stay at IAS CEU.

Warmest congratulations to IAS Senior Core Fellow Paul Spickard on his new publication entitled: 'Shape Shifting: Toward a Theory of Racial Change' that has been written and  published in 2022, while being a Fellow at IAS CEU.

IAS CEU warmly congratulates its 2012/13 alumna Christine M. Philliou on the publication of her monograph Turkey. A past against History (University of California Press, 2021). The book is directly related to the project that Christine M. Philliou was working on during her Senior fellowship at the IAS in 2012/13.

From its earliest days, the dominant history of the Turkish Republic has been one of national self-determination and secular democratic modernization. The story insisted on total rupture between the Ottoman Empire and the modern Turkish state and on the absolute unity of the Turkish nation. In recent years, this hermetic division has begun to erode, but as the old consensus collapses, new histories and accounts of political authority have been slow to take its place.

In this richly detailed alternative history, Christine M. Philliou focuses on the notion of political opposition and dissent—muhalefet—to connect the Ottoman and Turkish periods. Taking the perennial dissident Refik Halid Karay as a subject, guide, and interlocutor, she traces the fissures within the Ottoman and the modern Turkish elite that bridged the transition. Exploring Karay’s political and literary writings across four regimes and two stints in exile, Philliou upends the official history of Turkey and offers new dimensions to our understanding of its political authority and culture.

More on the book can be read in the UCP blog here

The period from October 1, 2020 to the end of June, 2021 has been especially productive for the IAS Affiliated Fellow Zsuzsa Hetényi. Zsuzsa prepared several important publications in Russian, English, German and Hungarian, gave interviews and commentaries, finalized an encyclopedia entry. IAS CEU is delighted to celebrate this remarkable achievement by listing all of them here.

1. The project on the legacy of Shimon Markish

Unvanished Past. Collected Works by Shimon Markish. Edited by Zsuzsa Hetényi (in Russian with forewords, commentaries, footnotes, biography, and bibliography, 2020).

Neproshedshee proshloe. Sobranie Sochinenii Shimona Markisha

Vol. 1. Antiquity. 474 pp. 2020

Vol. 2. Erasmus and his Age. 419 pp. 2021

Vol 3. Russian-Jewish literature of the 19th century (longer articles). 381 pp. 2021

Vol. 4. Russian-Jewish literature of the 19th century (essays). 339 pp. 2021

Vol. 5 Russian-Jewish literature of the 19th century (longer articles). 361 pp. 2021

The piece on the history of the archive, published in the Russian internet portal Colta (in Russian), can be found here. 

Zsuzsa gave an interview to the Radio Liberty on the occassion of the 90th birthday of Shimon Markish. The transcript of the interview can be read here.

Finally, Zsuzsa prepared and edited the entry on Shimon Markish in WikiWand. It can be accessed here.  

2. Other publications

The next achievement is the piece The Texture of Type: Nabokov’s Sensory Perception of Alphabetical Letters: The Semanticized Graphic Form published in Scando-Slavica, Vol 66, Issue 2. 

Zsuzsa has also translated the novel by Vladimir Nabokov Pnin, published by Helikon in April 2021.

The piece Antroponym as a Narrative Device Problematizing the Identity of the Author and his Character (V. Nabokov and V. Shklovsky in Berlin) was published in At the Crossroads of the East and West: the problem of Borderzone in Russian and Central European Cultures. Ed. by Zs. Hetényi, N. Zlydneva. Moscow, IS RAS, 2021. 488 p.

The piece Mit Cholera in Odessa. Sowjetische Abendteuer einer Ungarin ohne Kommunistische Erziehung was published in German in Lettre Internationale, Berlin, 28–32, the Summer Issue.

The piece Egy többnyelvű műfordítói műhely tapasztalatai. A MűMű és a Pofon was published in Hungarian in Iránytű az egyetemi fordítóképzéshez.

Finally, the piece Переводить с двух оригиналов: гибридизация при переводе Набокова was published in Russian in Семантизация – Концептуализация – Смысл. Сборник в честь 80-летия Профессора Ежи Фарыно, Ed. Roman Bobryk, Сергей Гончаров, Siedlce 2021.

“The East is a subtle affair…”        

 From the Soviet movie, White Sun of the Desert (1970)

The descendants of the ancient Bulgarians have been found! The question is - who will they vote for?

In faraway Turan, a small backward republic in central Asia, an expedition from faraway Bulgaria, a developed, rich country within the EU, searches for the cradle of the once-great Bulgarian nation. Professor Nestorov is convinced that the locals are direct descendants of the proto-Bulgarians and is ready to measure thousands of heads to prove his theory. And elections will soon take place in Bulgaria. The nation suffers from a demographic decline, the rating of politicians is falling. What could be better than finding new Bulgarian voters to cast the appropriate ballot? The historical mission to integrate the newly found blood brothers falls upon Professor Dokuzanov, the chief ideologue of the Keepers Order News TV Channel, an expert in the construction of authentic ancient fortresses, a peddler of myths and ceremonial wine mugs made from the skulls of long-dead Byzantine soldiers.

A dizzying series of absurd and comic situations ensues. Popov transports the reader into an exotic world of adventure and tumultuous love affairs, of dictators and free steppe riders, a world of songs, shamanic spells, and dancing on the thin ice of big politics. But under the star-covered dome, in the vast steppe, eternal questions continue to flare up: who are we, where do we come from, why are we here?

An allegorical story, as absurd as it is plausible, in which the small folk are nothing more than a bargaining chip. But their free will, which is seldom held into account, can disrupt the geostrategic plans of the fat cats. And maybe even change the ethnic map of old Europe...

Alek Popov's healing laughter comes to help us outlive our national complexes and delusions about our glorious past and look at the future with new eyes.

 Mission Turan comes exactly twenty years after the release of Mission London, the emblematic first novel by Alek Popov, translated in 17 languages so far. Mission Turan started out as a movie project and gradually acquired the texture of prose. The “quest for roots” is the core theme around which issues of corruption, demographic crisis, fears of migration and lack of democracy revolve. The novel takes an ironic approach to the phenomenon of rising nationalism in Eastern Europe and tries to see it in the broader context of the search for identity – a trend unfolding on various levels in post-modern societies all over the world. The plot is set in an imaginary land: the remote post-Soviet republic of Turan – the supposed cradle of the ancient Bulgarian civilization, ruled by an unscrupulous local autocrat.

 Although a work of fiction, Mission Turan is based on long and meticulous researches. Following the steps of his main characters, the author ventured out to South Siberia disguised as an anthropologist. He also spent several months in Budapest as a writer in residence with the Institute of Advanced Studies at CEU to explore the Hungarian tradition of the "quest for roots" drawing inspiration from the exploits of Arminius Vambery and Sándor Csoma de Kőrös.

***

Alek Popov is the author of several novels: Mission London, The Black Box, The Palaveev Sisters in the Storm of History, The Palaveev Sisters on the Road to the New World; the collection of essays The Radical Thinker’s Companion, as well as a series of short story collections, including Advanced Level, Transition Myths, Body Weeds, etc. He is among the most translated and read Bulgarian writers with more than 40 books published abroad. Alek Popov is the co-author of the screenplay of the film Mission London, based on his eponymous novel, as well as of several plays staged nationally and internationally. He has won a number of literary recognitions, including: the Helikon Award for New Bulgarian Prose (2002, 2013); the National Drama Award Ivan Radoev; the Elias Canetti Prize, the Helicon Flower for the best-selling book of 2007 and 2013, the British Pen Center Award for Literature in Translation, the ProzaBalkan Award for Contribution to Balkan Literature (2019) and others. Alek Popov is a corresponding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in the department of Arts.

IAS CEU Senior Core Fellow Tyrell Haberkorn co-authored an opinion piece titled Thailand must free student hunger strikers now in Nikkei Asia. 

Tyrell has been involved in extensive research on democratisation and legacy of dictatorship in Thailand. At IAS CEU she works on a project Dictatorship on Trial in Thailand that analyzes the individual, social, and legal impacts of the five years of dictatorship under the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO, 2014-2019) and identifies how they might be redressed and justice forged. 

Two IAS Senior Core Fellows contributed with their chapters to the Routledge Book of Dehumanization (ed. by Maria Kronfeldner) that is out in February 2021.  IAS CEU 2019/20 Senior Core Fellow Andrea Timár wrote a chapter titled Dehumanisation in Literature and the Figure of the Perpetrator and 2020/21 Senior Core Fellow Somogy Varga authored the chapter Could Dehumanization Be Perceptual?

The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization is the first comprehensive and multidisciplinary reference source on the subject and an outstanding survey of the key concepts, issues, and debates within dehumanization studies. Organized into four parts, the Handbook covers the following topics:

• The history of dehumanization from Greek Antiquity to the 20th century, contextualizing the oscillating boundaries, dimensions, and hierarchies of humanity in the history of the ‘West’;
• How dehumanization is contemporarily studied with respect to special contexts: as part of social psychology, as part of legal studies or literary studies, and how it connects to the idea of human rights, disability and eugenics, the question of animals, and the issue of moral standing;
• How to tackle its complex facets, with respect to the perpetrator’s and the target’s perspective, metadehumanization and selfdehumanization, rehumanization, social death, status and interdependence, as well as the fear we show toward robots that become too human for us;
• Conceptual and epistemological questions on how to distinguish different forms of dehumanization and neighboring phenomena, on why dehumanization appears so paradoxical, and on its connection to hatred, essentialism, and perception.

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, history, psychology, and anthropology, this Handbook will also be of interest to those in related disciplines, such as politics, international relations, criminology, legal studies, literary studies, gender studies, disability studies, or race and ethnic studies, as well as readers from social work, political activism, and public policy

CEU Department of Philosophy is hosting an on-line book launch on March 23, 2021. More information about the event can be found here.

(The Source: Official web-site of Routledge, routledge.com)

IAS Thyssen Felllow Larissa Buchholz published an article Art markets in crisis: how personal bonds and market subcultures mediate the effects of COVID-19 (co-authored with Gary Fine and Hannah Wohl) in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 8(3), 462-476. 

The piece examines how the contemporary art market has changed as a result of the disruptions caused by the novel coronavirus. Based on interviews with artists, collectors, a dealer, and an auction house executive, the article argues that the decline of face-to-face interaction, previously essential to art market transactions, has placed strain on each corner of the community. In the absence of physical co-presence with the artworks and art world actors, participants struggle to evaluate and appreciate artworks, make new social ties, develop trust, and experience a shared sense of pleasure and collective effervescence. These challenges especially impact the primary gallery market, where participants emphasize a communal commitment to art above instrumental speculation, which is more accepted in the secondary auction market. The article fidns a transition to distant online communication, but the likelihood of this continuing after the lockdowns end and the virus dissipates varies according to the subcultures of these market segments.

IAS CEU Core Junior Fellow Petr Vašát published an article Making city-bases: homeless places, poverty management, and urban change in Pilsen, Czechia  in Urban Geography (online first). 

The article explores how homeless people make places in the public space, while revealing some of the overlooked effects these places may have on the wider city. The article relies on extensive ethnographic research and media coverage analysis of a place called Eskalátory (the Escalators) in Pilsen, a second-order city in Czechia. Eskalátory is part of an underpass with a four-lane road, a tramway, and four outdoor escalators, altogether, forming a specific urban assemblage. The paper describes three specific assemblage enactments of poverty management, homeless placemaking, and socio-materiality, and argues the place played a crucial role in urban change involving the surrounding area. Therefore, it conceptualizes Eskalátory as a “city-base”, an assemblage produced by actors human and non-human that contributes to urban outcome. 

Petr Vašát's interview with María José Álvarez Rivadulla from the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia titled The politics of the makeshift city: materiality, symbolic boundaries, and social relations in squatter settlements in Latin America was also published in Studia Ethnologica Pragensia (2020, 1: 101-109).

Another fantastic piece of news from IAS 2017/18 Senior Core fellow Juraj Buzalka whose book The cultural economy of protest in post-socialist European Union. Village fascists and their rivals (Routledge, 2020) is out now! 

Focusing on Slovakia and East Central Europe, this book examines the cultural economy of protest and considers how the origins of political movements – progressive and reactionary – derive from resilient agrarian features.

It draws attention to how the legacy of rural socialist modernization influences contemporary politics and to the ‘village’ version of fascism developing in the region. The chapters look at the interplay of post-peasant economic and political habits and representations as a result of state-socialism and with regard to the European project, as viewed through an ethnographic lens. Juraj Buzalka describes the bulk of Slovak citizens as post-socialist Europeans with a connection to the countryside who feel that this is where real power in society should be defined and based. He also observes the politicians who are skillfully mobilizing post-peasants while exploiting the political-economic context of the European Union.

This volume will be relevant to scholars with an interest in European society and politics, particularly protest and populism, from disciplines including anthropology, sociology, political science and history.