Dr. habil. Zsolt Czigányik
associate professor
Biography:
I was born in 1974 in Budapest. I attended the Secondary Grammar School of the Piarist Fathers and I graduated from the Institute Le Rosey in Switzerland. I hold an MA from ELTE's English Department and a BTh from Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest. I used to teach in a secondary school and at the teacher training college of Szombathely. I began teaching at the English Department of ELTE in 2008, while still a student of the Doctoral School of Literature. Between 2013 and 2020 I worked as a Humanities Initiative fellow at CEU, while I participated in Erasmus exchange programmes in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Royal Holloway. I am the treasurer of the Utopian Studies Society Europe. I live in Budapest with my wife and four children.
Research:
My research focus is utopian and dystopian literature and the social and cultural phenomena related to utopianism. I'm also interested in the relationship of fictive literature and the social sciences, particularly the history of ideas and political science. Currently I'M working on a monograph investigating the utopian tradition in Hungarian literature.
Selected publications:
- Utopia in Eastern Central Europe – the Hungarian Scene. In Cathy Shrank et al. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of More’s Utopia. Oxford University Press (2023), pp. 411-427.
- Utópiák után, utópiák ellen: A disztópia a modern angol irodalomban. In Bényei Tamás (szerk.) Az angol irodalom története 6.: Az 1930-as évektől napjainkig. Első rész. Budapest: Kijárat Kiadó (2022/2023) pp. 350-360.
- A szabadsághiány anatómiái: Az emberi szabadság XX. századi angol ellenutópiákban. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2011.
- Utopian Horizons: Ideology, Politics, Literature. Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2017.
- “Utópia és utópizmus: Egy irodalmi és politikai fogalompár nyomában.” Korunk 30.2 (2019): 11-22.
- “Readers’ responsibility: Literature and censorship in the Kádár Era in Hungary.” Confrontations and Interactions: Essays on Cultural Memory. Ed. Bálint Gárdos, Ágnes Péter, Natália Pikli, Máté Vince. Budapest: L'Harmattan Kiadó, 2011. 223-234.
- “Satire and Dystopia: Two Genres?” HUSSE Papers 2003: Literature and culture. Ed. Tamás Bényei Debrecen: KLTE, 2004. 305-309.
Selected conferences
- "Fictionality and Non-Fiction in Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun.” Excellence in Arts and Sciences: The Huxley Family, MTA-ELTE, Budapest, Hungary, 2019.
- "Thomas Molnar, the erudite opponent of utopianism.” 20th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society, Monash University, Prato, Italy, 2019.
- "Harmony of past, present and future - the idea of the recurrence of political cycles" 19th International Conference Utopian Studies Society, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain, 2018.
- "The Cult of Orwell – or why has Trump made 1984 so popular?" Utopian Studies Society conference, Europejskie Centrum Solidarności and Uniwersytet Gdański, Gdansk, Poland, 2017.
- "Alternative Education’s Responses to some Dystopian Aspects of Contemporary Society." (with Anna Ébényi). Utopia 500 Conference, Universidade Nova, Lisbon, Portugal, 2016.
Teaching
- Contemporary literature in English (prose)
- Utopian and political literature
- Film adaptations of contemporary novels
- 20th and 21st century culture and society
Supervision
Further information
I translated works by Aldous Huxley and David Mitchell into Hungarian.