Project members
Dr. Endre Szécsényi is Professor at the Department of Aesthetics at ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest), and holds an honorary research fellowship in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies of the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, UK). He graduated in Aesthetics and Hungarian Philology from the University of Pécs in 1990. He received his PhD in Philosophy in 2001, and his habilitation in 2010 from ELTE. He has taught in the Institute for Art Theory and Media Studies of ELTE as Recurrent Visiting Lecturer (1999–2002), as Senior Lecturer (2003–2006), and as Associate Professor (2006–2015); since 2015 he has held a Full Professorship. He obtained several research fellowships abroad including two A. W. Mellon Fellowships (IWM, Vienna; Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University of Edinburgh), a Magyar Fellowship (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences), and a two-year Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (University of Aberdeen). He was one of the editors of BUKSZ – Budapest Review of Books between 1997 and 2014, and he has been the series-editor of the Laokoón Könyvek series of the L’Harmattan Publishing House (Budapest) since 2008. His primary research field is the intellectual history and the history of aesthetics of the Enlightenment.
Dr. Bálint Gárdos is Lecturer in English Literature at ELTE. His book under the title Pedestrian Romantics: A Study of the Early Nineteenth Century British Essay (L’Harmattan, Budapest, 2012) is the first Hungarian monograph on the aesthetics of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. He graduated in Aesthetics and English Studies, then obtained his PhD in English Studies from ELTE. He has published articles (in English and in Hungarian) on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British aesthetics and the essay tradition. Currently he is working on a study on the problem of history in Enlightenment criticism.
Dr. Zsolt Komáromy is Senior Lecturer of English at ELTE. Budapest. He studied English, comparative literature, and aesthetics at the same university, and held scholarships at the University of Edinburgh, at University College Dublin, and at Trinity College Dublin, and was recipient of the Békésy György Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. He has translated prose works by John Milton, S. T. Coleridge, and W. B. Yeats, as well as essays by Edward Said, Northrop Frye, and Stanley Cavell. His main field of research is eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature and aesthetics. He has published studies (in both English and Hungarian) on John Donne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Edmund Burke, Alexander Gerard, and Edward Young, among others. He has recently written on the role of the Italian opera in eighteenth-century British aesthetics for a volume he co-edited with Péter Dávidházi (Párbeszédben Ruttkay Kálmánnal, MTA Irodalomtudomány Intézet, 2015). He has also co-edited (with András Kiséry and Zsuzsanna Varga) a volume (to which he contributed a study and a co-written introduction) on the intercultural contexts of Hungarian literature, Worlds of Hungarian Writing. National Literature as Intercultural Exchange (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016). He is currently working on The Hungarian History of English Literature, Part 3: 1640–1830 (in Hungarian), as co-editor (with Bálint Gárdos and Miklós Péti) and contributor, a work in progress that is scheduled for publication in 2017 or 2018. He is the author of the monograph Figures of Memory: From the Muses to Eighteenth Century British Aesthetics (2011, reviewed in The Scriblerian, SEL, Budapest Review of Books and Irodalomtörténet).
Dr. Veronika Ruttkay is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English Studies at ELTE. Her doctoral dissertation (2007, University of Glasgow) explored connections between S. T. Coleridge’s Shakespearean lectures and British philosophical criticism in the late eighteenth century (the work of Lord Kames, Alexander Gerard and Joseph Priestley, among others). She has published articles and book chapters in English and in Hungarian on various aspects of Scottish enlightenment rhetoric and criticism, on Shakespeare, romanticism, and translation studies. She translated Coleridge’s Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit into Hungarian (2004) and was co-editor of two collections: Idegen költők – örök barátaink: Világirodalom a magyar kulturális emlékezetben (“Foreign poets – eternal friends: World literature in the Hungarian cultural memory”; 2010); Ritka művészet / Rare Device: Írások Péter Ágnes tiszteletére / Essays in Honour of Ágnes Péter (2011), and of the conference proceedings of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English (2014). Currently she holds a Bolyai Fellowship from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and works on a research project exploring questions of translation and appropriation in connection with the work of Robert Burns.
Dr. Márton Bársony is Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Aesthetics of ELTE, earlier he was Visiting Assistant at the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2014). He has already defended his dissertation in the Doctoral School of Literary Studies of ELTE in 2016 (Shakespeare’s clown. The Decarnivalization of the World in Three of His Dramas) and now he is working on his second dissertation in the Graduate School of Philosophy. He majored in History and Aesthetics at ELTE. His theses have been presented at conferences like the Harvard-Yale Conference in Book History (2014), the 15th International Bakhtin Conference (2014), or the annual conference of Renaissance Society of America, in Berlin (2015). His basic interests and studies cover a wide range of areas, like laughter philosophy, carnivalesque culture, dramatic art of William Shakespeare, madness and folly theories. He published papers in Hungarian and in English in different Hungarian (e.g. Holmi, apokrif online) and Polish (Studia Religiologica) periodicals, and also some essays in books (Vidimus enim stellam eius…, ed. László Szávay, Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2011, pp. 25–32; Asteriskos. Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Doktori Iskolák tanulmányai 4., Filozófiatudományi Doktori Iskola, Művészettörténet-tudományi Doktori Iskola. (ed. Vilmos Bárdosi), Budapest: ELTE BTK, 2013, pp. 211–228). He is the main organizer and the founder of Pesti Bölcsész Akadémia (Humanities Academy of Pest), the well-known open university of his institution. He also organized a number of conferences in Hungary (“Esztétika – Mi végre?” I–III. Conferences, May 6, 2011; May 11, 2012, 2013; Fiatal Kutatók és Doktoranduszok III. Nemzetközi Teológuskonferenciája, November 2–4, 2012; “Porondon: a cirkusz – Cirkuszkutatás 2012-ben” Conference, May 24–25, 2012). As an expert on carnival culture and clowning, he was invited to speak in TV broadcasts in the topic (Duna TV, M5) on several occasions.
Botond Csuka is PhD student in the Doctoral Programme of Aesthetics at ELTE, and he is a Lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Physical Education, Budapest. He is writing his dissertation on the various teleological accounts of aesthetic experience in the British Enlightenment. He translated John Baillie’s 1747 An Essay on the Sublime and has published studies in Hungarian and in English on Francis Hutcheson’s philosophy of mind, the physiological and medical dimensions of Joseph Addison’s and Edmund Burke’s aesthetics and the significance of the concepts of sensibility and vivacity in György Szerdahely’s Aesthetica (forthcoming), while also published reviews on the subject in Hungarian and international journals (Estetika, British Journal of Aesthetics – forthcoming). In a recent study in English (“Aesthetics and Its Histories”), he has examined the methodological problems raised by the historiography of aesthetics in general, arguing for a pluralistic, hermeneutic approach to the history of aesthetics instead of a strict contextualist or an unreflexive appropriationist view.
László Kőszeghy is MA student in Aesthetics at ELTE, and a member of Mérei Ferenc College for Advanced Studies, moreover an editor/intern at Liget. He studied philosophy and French at the University of Primorska in 2015, and earned a BA in Liberal Arts (specialized in aesthetics and literary criticism) at ELTE in 2016. His academic field of interest is the notion of taste in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his BA thesis written under the supervision of Prof. Sándor Radnóti, he argues that Lord Shaftesbury’s theory of taste can be regarded as antithetical to courtly theoreticians’ account of taste in the seventeenth century. Its abridged version was published in Laokoón (2016). His latest publication (“A természetes jó ízlésről”, Liget, 2017/1) discusses how the ideology of natural good taste serves as a means to reproduce inequalities.
Dániel Takács is a PhD student in the Doctoral Programme of Aesthetics at ELTE. He graduated History (MA) in 2009 and Philosophy (MA) in 2012. His main field of research is the interrelations of satirical literature (Dryden, Rochester, John Gay, Pope) and the aesthetic, epistemological theories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He published papers in Hungarian on the subject of rhetorical tradition and literature, irony and philosophy of irony. (“Az irónia alakzatai John Gay Koldusoperájában” In: Közelítések a szatírához, L’Harmattan Kiadó, Budapest, 2013.) His broad field of interest cover the areas of British conservatism, the aesthetical element in politics (Edmund Burke), and the theories of sublime.