Diana Mishkova Bio: Mishkova has been the Academic Director, since 2000, of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia. She has published extensively on comparative Balkan history, intellectual history, and historiography. Her recent publications include Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making (New York: Routledge, 2018), European Regions and Boundaries. A Conceptual History, co-edited with Balázs Trencsényi (London: Berghahn Books, 2017), and Entangled Histories of the Balkans. Vol. 2: Transfer of Political Ideologies and Institutions, and Vol. 4: Concepts, Approaches, and (Self-) Representations, co-edited with Roumen Daskalov et al. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013, 2017).

Orlanda Obad Bio: Orlanda Obad is a senior assistant at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (IEF). She draws upon several disciplines – sociology, cultural anthropology and political science. She participated in several international research projects, including INFORM (Horizon 2020), in which she co-develops the concept of caring (female) entrepreneurship. She is the founder of Ruralije, an informal research group concerned with rural development, and she also directs a series of public lectures and discussions – Tribina IEF-a – at the Institute. Her topics of interest include rural development, emotional capital, critique of Balkanism, European Union and the Western Balkans, and 1990s in Croatia.

Balázs Trencsényi Bio: Balázs Trencsényi is a Professor at the History Department of Central European University, Budapest. His main field of interest is the history of modern political thought in East-Central Europe. Between 2008 and 2013, he was Principal Investigator of the ERC project, “Negotiating Modernity: History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe.” Among his recent publications are The Politics of ‘National Character’: A Study in Interwar East European Thought (Routledge, 2012), and A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, Vol. 1: Negotiating Modernity in the “Long Nineteenth Century” (Oxford UP, 2016).

Zoltán Ginelli Bio: Zoltán Ginelli is a PhD Candidate in human geography, a member of the Working Group for Public Sociology “Helyzet”, and an assistant in the research project “1989 after 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective” at Exeter University. His dissertation unravels the geographical history of Cold War geography and spatial planning, the globalization of geography’s “quantitative revolution” between the 1950s and 1970s, and the transnational history of Walter Christaller’s central place theory. His current research focuses on socialist globalization and foreign policy in Hungary during the Cold War, the connections between socialist Eastern Bloc and the “Third World”, and Hungary’s semiperipheral relation to colonialism and decolonization. In his research and teaching he engages with the geographies of scientific knowledge, policy mobilities, actor-network theory, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and transnational or global history.

Mission The Center promotes comparative and interdisciplinary studies with a global perspective at the intersection of economics, sociology and international relations, simultaneously analyzing global and local dynamics and their interconnectedness. Our aim is to scrutinize historically evolving transnational linkages, persistent inequalities and conflicts between social groups, communities and various regions of the world. We are committed to research and training, which avoids pitfalls of Eurocentrism or any other ways of essentializations widespread in social sciences and humanities. Our work takes a critical stance to uncover entrenched ideas that justify established regimes of global governance that perpetuate forms of redistribution and inequalities. We are also committed to future oriented studies, in the sense that we would like to reflect on possible alternatives to prevailing governmental practices both on the local and the global level.

Procedures and membership Who can join? Corvinus faculty, PhD Student with relevant topic, External faculty with relevant research field. Whom to contact? polanyi.center@uni-corvinus.hu