Dr. habil. Andrea Timár
associate professor
Biography:
I am an Associate Professor (PhD. Habil.) at the Department of English Studies, Eötvös Loránd University. I hold MAs in English and French. I am currently the Director of the Doctoral Programme in Modern English and American Literature and Culture. I am interested in the frontiers of literature, philosophy, and critical theory. I studied at the University of Leuven and Royal Holloway, University of London during my doctoral years. My monograph Cultivation, Addiction, Habits (Palgrave, 2015. paperback: 2017) was nominated for the First Book Prize by the British Association for Romantic Studies. Between 2015 and 2019, I led the T.H.E (The Human Enigma) Doctoral Research Group. In 2019/2020, I was a research fellow at the CEU Institute for Advanced Studies, doing research on dehumanization (with a focus on the literary representations of perpetrators), and the literary implications of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy. I was the co-editor of the journal The AnachronisT (1998-2021) and have been an editor of Helikon Literary and Cultural Studies Review (since 2021). In 2022, I was the recipient of a research grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for a publication in Arendt Studies ("Against Compassion..." 2022/6), and the ELTE grant for excellence in publication for my paper in the Q1 journal Critical Horizons ("Critiques of Violence: Arendt, Sedgwick, and Cavarero Respond to Billy Budd's Stutter"). In Spring 2024, I will be on sabbatical, working on my book Reading with Arendt at Brown University. I am married, with two sons, Jonatán (2014) and Vilmos (2017).
Research:
I wrote my PhD in British Romanticism, on the writings of S.T Coleridge's, being interested in the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and politics. I the past few years, I have been dealing with the broader issue of the “human”, with posthumanisms, and, recently, dehumanization, with a special focus on perpetrators, and the questions of sympathy/empathy. I am currently studying Hannah Arendt’s work, more particularly, the role of literature and the aesthetic in Arendt’s political philosophy.
Selected publications:
- "Against Compassion: Arendt, Benjamin, Melville, and Coleridge" in Arendt Studies, 2022/6.
- "Dehumanization in Literature, the Figure of the Perpetrator.” The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanisation. Ed. Maria Kronfeldner. New York: Routledge, 2020.
- A Modern Coleridge: Addiction, Cultivation, Habits. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
- “The Murder of the Mother(tongue): Agota Kristof’s The Notebook.” Bicultural Literature and Film in French and English. Ed. P. Powrie, P. Barta. London: Routledge, 2015. 222-236.
- “Derrida and the Immune System." Et al: Terrorism and Aesthetics. Ed. Gy. Fogarasi. Szeged: Szegedi Tudományegyetem, 2014.
- "Critiques of Violence: Arendt, Sedgwick, and Cavarero Respond to Billy Budd’s Stutter" in Critical Horizons, 24:2, 164-179.
Selected conferences
- "Hannah Arendt, Literature and the Politics of Storytelling." Zoom talk, CEU, Institute for Advanced Studies, 2020.
- "Responding to Billy Budd's Stutter: Arendt, Sedgwick, Cavarero." Mimetic Inclinations, KULeuven, Leuven, Belgium, 18-19 November 2021.
- "The Human Being may be dishumanised." Coleridge’s Living Ideas Conference (invited speaker, postponed), University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, 2020.
- "'View the ocean as poets do': The (Im)Possibilities of Posthuman Reading, Literature and the Sea: 1750-1850." University of Malta, Valletta, Malta, 2017.
- “Modernity and the Discourse of Addiction: Coleridge and Walter Benjamin.” Invited speaker at the Literary London Conference, Brunel University, London, UK, 2008.
Teaching
- Introduction to Literary Theory
- The Question of the „Human”
- Posthumanisms
- Dehumanization: from Arendt to Agamben
- Theories of Addiction
- S.T. Coleridge
- 18th-19th century British Literarure
- Introduction to Literature
Supervision
Any topic from the 18th-21st centuries, including literary/critical theory, that I can meaningfully engage with.