Academic staff

Dr. habil. Zsolt Czigányik

associate professor

Dr. habil. Zsolt Czigányik

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:

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

I supervise topics related to utopian or dystopian literature and the contemporary novel.

Further information

I translated works by Aldous Huxley and David Mitchell into Hungarian.

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