Academic staff

Dr. habil. Zsolt Komáromy

associate professor

Dr. habil. Zsolt Komáromy

Biography:

I earned MA degrees in English literature and in aesthetics at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, whereI also I conducted my doctoral studies in the Doctoral School for Literature (my supervisor was Győző Ferencz). I completed my PhD in 2003. During my graduate studies I spent a year at the University of Edinburgh (under the supervision of Colin Nicholson) with a British council scholarship, and a year at Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin with a Soros doctoral research scholarship. I was awarded the Békésy György Postdoctoral Scholarship, working as a research assistant at the Department of English Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, where I became an assistant professor in 2006. I have also taught at the English Department of Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church, and a semester each at the University of Debrecen and the University of Szeged. I completed my habilitation in 2018 and was appointed associate professor in 2019 at the Department of English Studies, Eötvös Loránd University.

Research:

My first field of research was the poetry of W. B. Yeats. My interests then shifted to earlier ages and to the history of ideas. My doctoral dissertation and my first book was written on the the notion of memory in the history of aesthetics, with a focus on 18th century British thought. My research in literature also centres on the 18th century, and on the Romantic age, with a primary interest in the work of William Wordsworth, English classicism, and the literary- and critical history of the long 18th century and romanticism. Most recently my research focuses on the problems and methods of the writing of literary history, my habilitation thesis was written in this subject, entitled "Forms and Ages. An experiment in the literary history of the long eighteenth century."

Selected publications:

Selected conferences

  • Conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, online, April 2021: "Rhetoric Revisited", roundtable participant
  • Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Oxford, St Hughe's College, January 2019: "Genetic Interactions in Thomson's 'Seasons'" 
  • "Registers of Philosophy" conference of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, April 2017, invited respondent to Adam Potkay's plenary lecture “Rhetoric and Philosophy from Cicero to Adam Smith: Tropes, Dialogue, Self-Division”
  • Conference of the  Modern Language Association of America (MLA), Seattle, January 2012: „Wordsworth in Hungarian Cultural Memory”
  • Joint conference of The Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society and the Hungarian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, Budapest, March 2005:„Scottish Rhetoricians and Critical History: Some Remarks on the Notions of Memory, Imagination and Vivacity”

Teaching

  • English literary history from the Restoration to 1890
  • 18th-century English poetry
  • English classicism
  • Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads
  • Wordsworth: The Prelude

Supervision

BA / MA:

  • Restoration literature; 
  • The literature of the early 18th century 
  • The literature of the later 18th century
  • Augustan poetry
  • The English novel in the 18th century
  • The literature of sentiment and sensibility in the 18th century
  • Romantic poetry
  • Gothic and Romantic novels
  • The works of W. B. Yeats
  • The poetry of T. S. Eliot
  • Interpretation of works using the categories of contemporary literary theory

Doctoral:

  • British Romanticism
  • British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century

Further information