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

Teaching

Supervision

Further information