Academic staff

Dr. habil. Andrea Timár

associate professor

Dr. habil. Andrea Timár

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:

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.


Further information