Sára Bagdi
has been working at the Kassák Museum–Petőfi Literary Museum since 2021 as junior research fellow in the framework of the research project “Digital Critical Edition of the Correspondence of Lajos Kassák and Jolán Simon between 1909 and 1928, and New Perspectives for Modernism Studies” (OTKA FK-139325). At the Kassák Museum she co-curated the exhibition Wonderful Story? An Avant-Garde Artist Couple: Erzsi Újvári and Sándor Barta in 2022. She received an MA from the Department of Art History of Eötvös Loránd University in 2018 and completed her MA studies in Aesthetics at the same university in 2019. Currently she is a PhD student in Budapest, partially pursuing her research at the University of Hamburg as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship holder. Her research areas include workers’ culture between the two world wars, primitivism and the history of left-wing ideas.
Imre József Balázs
is Associate Professor at the Department of Hungarian Literature at Babeş- Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania; research fellow at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu; and editor of the cultural review Korunk since 1999. His major publications include Az avantgárd az erdélyi magyar irodalomban (The Avant-garde in Transylvanian Hungarian Literature, 2006; Romanian translation by Kocsis Francisko, 2009); Avant-garde and Representations of Communism in Hungarian Literature from Romania (2009); A szürrealizmus története a magyar irodalmi mezőben (The History of Surrealism in the Hungarian Literary Field, 2021). He is also the author of book chapters and articles on Surrealism in English, French, German and Italian.
Alexandru Bar
is a Research Associate in the Department of History of Art at the University of York. His work is trans-disciplinary and trans-national, combining art history, cultural history, and Jewish studies. He earned his MA at Tel Aviv University in Israel (on a Masa scholarship) and his PhD at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom (on an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded scholarship with the project “Performing Jewish Archives”). His research explores the rarely examined relationship between Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, their thinking and language. He seeks a renewed consideration of the symbolic substance of Tzara’s and Janco’s Jewish experience and the role it played in defining their national identity. His most recent research project provides an original account of the life and creative endeavours of Marcel Janco after 1940, with the aim of creating a more comprehensive understanding of Janco’s Jewish identity and the influence of suffering and disillusionment on his introspective exploration of art.
is Professor of Literary Studies in the Department of Dutch Studies at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. Among his book publications are Metzler Avantgarde Lexikon (ed. with W. Fähnders 2009), A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925 (ed. with I. Hautamäki et al. 2012), Transnationality, Internationalism and Nationhood: European Avant-Garde in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (ed. with L. Głuchowska 2013) and Dada. Een geschiedenis (2016).
Günter Berghaus
is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol and has been Guest Professor at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and the State University of Rio de Janeiro. He has been principal organiser of several international conferences and has held research awards from the Polish Academy of Sciences, the German Research Foundation, the Italian Ministry of Culture, the British Academy and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He has published over twenty books on various aspects of theatre and performance studies, art history and cultural politics. His works have been translated into Chinese, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. He currently serves as general editor of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Handbook of International Futurism and of International Futurism 1945–2015: A Bibliographic Handbook.
Oliver A. I. Botar
is Professor of Art History and Associate Director at the School of Art, University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. His PhD (Toronto) was on Biomorphic Modernism and Biocentrism. The nexus of Biocentrism-Modernism, the Hungarian avant-garde, László Moholy-Nagy, Canadian Modernism and the origins of new media art have been his research focuses. He has lectured, published and curated exhibitions in Canada, the US, Europe and Japan. He is author of Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered (2006) and Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts (2014), as well as numerous articles, book chapters and exhibition catalogues. He is co-editor of Biocentrism and Modernism (with Isabel Wünsche, 2011).
Alexandra Chiriac
is an art historian specialising in histories of twentieth-century Modernism, with a focus on design and performance. During 2020–22, she was a Leonard A.
Krisztina Zsófia Csaba
is an MA art historian, who received her degree from the Department of Art History of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and who also studied at the University of Vienna and at the Free University of Berlin. She has completed an internship at the Museum Ludwig in Köln and worked as a research assistant at the Kassák Museum in Budapest. Her BA thesis concerned the Book of New Artists (1922), an avant-garde anthology edited by Lajos Kassák and László Moholy-Nagy, while her MA thesis is entitled “Dada and Constructivism in East Central Europe in the Early 1920s”. Currently she is researching the relation between Dada and Constructivism.
Irina M. Denischenko
is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2018. Her work focuses on twentieth-century literature and visual art – especially the avant-garde – on critical theory, and on women’s contributions to avant-garde and Modernist aesthetics in Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia. She has written on Czech Poetist image poetry, Mikhail Bakhtin’s aesthetics and epistemology, theories of the avant-garde, and the experimental cinema of Kira Muratova and Renata Litvinova, among other topics. She is currently completing her book manuscript Lyrical Nomadism, which examines the democratic potential of Vladimir Ma-yakovsky’s poetry and its legacies against theories of the novel and feminist-posthumanist thought, as well as a volume of new Bakhtin translations (with Alexander Spektor).
Iulia Dondorici
is a postdoctoral researcher in Romance Studies. She holds a PhD in Romanian Literary Studies from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her current research interests are: French and francophone avant-garde movements in the first half of the twentieth century, women writers and artists participating in Dada and
Gábor Dobó
has been a research fellow at the Kassák Museum since 2015. He focuses on Modernist periodicals of the interwar period, with a special emphasis on the East and Central European region. Currently, he is the principal investigator of the research project “Digital Critical Edition of the Correspondence of Lajos Kassák and Jolán Simon between 1909 and 1928, and New Perspectives for Modernism Studies” (OTKA FK-139325). He is a committee member of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit), and was the co-organizer of the 10th ESPRit conference in Budapest. In 2022, he was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University in New York City. Previously, he studied at universities in Budapest (MA degree, 2011, PhD, 2018), Florence (MA degree, 2011), and Angers (visiting PhD student, spring semester 2014).
Györgyi Földes
is a PhD literary historian and critic. She works at the Literary Institute of the Research Centre for the Humanities and is editor-in-chief of Helikon, a journal of Cultural and Literary Studies. Her fields of research are nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, modern and contemporary Hungarian literature, the avant-garde, gender and theories of the body. She has published books on the anti-Impressionism of the Hungarian avant-garde in the 1910s: Hadüzenet minden impresszionizmusnak (A Declaration of W ar on Impressionism, 2006); on the symbolic poetics of classical modernism: Textus, szimbólum, allegória (Textus, Symbol, Allegory, 2012); as well as on representations of the body and the “Other” in literature: Test-szöveg-test (Body-Text-Body, 2018). In 2021, she published two volumes of essays. The first concerns women writers in the Hungarian avant-garde: Akit “nem látni az erdőben”: Avantgárd nőírók nemzetközi és magyar vetületben (The One “Not Seen in the Woods”: Avant-garde Women Writers in International and Hungarian Perspectives); the second highlights transnational ideas in historical and neo-avant-gardes: Avantgárd anziksz: Transznacionális elvek és gyakorlatok az avantgárd és neoavantgárd művészetben (Avant-garde Anzix: Transnational Ideas and Practices in Avant-garde and Neo-avant-garde Art).
works as a researcher, curator, translator, and gardener. She is currently preparing her first book manuscript on the Czechoslovak avant-garde and technologies of print, and a second monograph on the full life of Míra Holzbachová. Previously, she was Postdoctoral Fellow in the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives) Fellow at MoMA for Central and Eastern Europe, and Czech Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the sole editor of International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019) as well as co-curator of Lucia Moholy: Exposures (Kunsthalle Prague, opening May 2024) and BAUHAUS↔VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels (Museum of Modern Art, 2018). Forbes holds a PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Éva Forgács
is an art historian, critic, curator and Adjunct Professor of Art History at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She was curator at the Hungarian Museum of Decorative Arts, Professor of Art History at the László Moholy-Nagy University and has taught at the Eötvös Loránd University, Department of Aesthetics in her native Budapest. She was Visiting Professor at University College Los Angeles, the College of Santa Fe, and at OTIS College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. She was co-curator (with Nancy Perloff) of Monuments of the Future: Designs by El Lissitzky at the Getty Research Institute in 1998. She served as book review editor for Centropa, a New York-based scholarly journal of Central European art (2001–2015). Her books include Hungarian Art: Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement (2016), The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (1995), the co-edited volume Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes (with Timothy O. Benson, 2002), Művészet veszélyes csillagzat alatt (Art under Dangerous Constellation), a selection of the writings of Ernst Kállai (1982), several monographs and two volumes of essays. She has widely published essays and reviews in journals, edited volumes, and catalogues.
Judit Galácz
graduated from the Eötvös Loránd University in Art History in 2011, and received her MA in Central European History from the Central European University in 2014. Currently, she is a PhD student at the Art History Doctoral Program of Eötvös Loránd University. The topic of her dissertation is János Mácza and the history of Hungarian avant-garde theatre from 1915 to 1926. Her research interest includes the history of Hungarian avant-garde theatre between the two world wars, with a focus on the theatrical movements of East-Central Europe. Currently, she is an archivist at the Museum of Fine Arts – Central European Research Institute for Art History, Archive and Documentation Centre in Budapest.
is a PhD art historian. Her research focuses on avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century. She is mainly interested in the politics of artistic practices (creation, collection, criticism and institutionalisation) considered as “avant-garde” in its broad sense. In her PhD thesis, she examines how French and foreign art critics’ political arguments in favour of immigrant artistes gathered under the name École de Paris are crystallised in and transformed into aesthetic categories, via the principal example of Emil Szittya. Her latest publications concern the avant-garde artist’s vagabondage as a déclassé, but emancipatory version of the grand tour, and its social, legal and cultural circumstances, as well as dreams induced by atrocity as sources of art.
Jasna Jovanov
is a full-time professor at the EDUCONS University, Sremska Kamenica, Serbia. Her research focuses on Serbian art history and fine art theory, highlighting some of the most crucial moments, such as confrontation between Serbian and European art of the twentieth century, aspects of Modernism, as well as avant-garde art practice. Her research has produced a large number of museum exhibitions, TV film screenplays, monographs and essays. She is also an art critic and interpreter of art history and fiction. She has worked in the Gallery of Matica Srpska, continued as the director of The Pavle Beljanski Memorial Collection and currently working as a full-time professor and dean of the EDUCONS University Fine Arts Academy. She has received numerous awards for her work.
András Kappanyos
is Scientific Counsellor and Deputy Director at the Institute of Literary Studies, HUN-REN Centre for the Humanities. In addition, he teaches literary history and theory as a professor at the University of Miskolc. Formerly he also taught at the University of Pécs, and in 2016–2017 he was Visiting Professor at Indiana University. His research interests include English and Hungarian literary Modernism, the avant-garde and translation theory. He has authored seven books (on T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, the avant-garde, Hungarian literary movements and, most recently, on translation studies) and edited several others, including a new edition of James Joyce’s oeuvre in Hungarian.
Michalina Kmiecik †
was working as a researcher in the Chair of Literary Theory and in the Centre for Avant-Garde Studies at the Faculty of Polish Studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
Károly Kókai
is a lecturer at the Institute for European and Comparative Language and Literature Studies of the University of Vienna. His research interests include cultures of migration, avant-garde studies, and Central European cultural history. His publications include Ungarn: Geschichte und Kultur (Hungary: History and Culture, 2017) and Migration und Literatur in Mitteleuropa: Komparatistische Studien (Migration and Literature in Central Europe: Comparative Studies, 2018).
Emanuel Modoc
obtained his PhD from the Department of Comparative and Universal Literature at the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, with a thesis on the networks of East-Central European avant-gardes. He is a Research Assistant at the Sextil Pușcariu Institute of Linguistics and Literary History, the Romanian Academy. He authored the volume Internaționala periferiilor: Rețeaua avangardelor din Europa Centrală și de Est (The International of Peripheries: Avant-Garde Networks of East-Central Europe, 2020) and edited the collected literary works of Surrealist poet Paul Păun (2020). His research interests include transnational literary networks, computational analysis and network theory.
Arndt Niebisch
received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University with a thesis on the noise aesthetics of Italian Futurism and German Dadaism, published as Media Parasites in the Early Avantgarde (2012). He completed his Habilitation at the University of Vienna with a book on Heinrich von Kleist’s life and work. In his research he deals with the intersection of literature and media from the eighteenth century to the present. He lives and works in Vienna.
is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences and an Associate Researcher and curator at the Archiv der Avantgarden, Dresden. He was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Georgia, a fellow at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome and recipient of a Korea Foundation fellowship in Seoul. He is the author of several dozen academic articles, and published extensively his research on sport and the avant-garde, as well as on sport and contemporary art. Together with Andreas Kramer he has co-edited Sport and the European Avant-Garde (1900–1945) (Brill: 2021), and published a monograph Picturing the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads. Modernist and Avant-Garde Engagement with Sport in Central Europe and the USSR (1920–1932) (Routledge: 2022).
Merse Pál Szeredi
is an art historian, Director of the Petőfi Literary Museum–Kassák Museum in Budapest, and PhD candidate at the Eötvös Loránd University. His research focuses on the Hungarian avant-garde during the 1910s and 1920s, especially on Lajos Kassák and his magazine Ma (Today) in Vienna between 1920 and 1925. He has published essays in Hungarian, English and German in academic journals, edited volumes and exhibition catalogues; and he has curated several exhibitions in the Kassák Museum. He has co-edited a volume on Lajos Kassák’s avant-garde journals entitled Art in Action (2018).
Jindřich Toman
is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research focuses on the avant-gardes of Central Europe, including the history of photomontage and modernist book design. A monograph on functional typography in interwar Czechoslovakia is among his current projects.
Edit Tóth
earned her PhD from Pennsylvania State University and she is currently Professor of Practice at University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of Design and Visual Culture from the Bauhaus to Contemporary Art: Optical Deconstructions (2018), which creatively reconsiders Bauhaus-related works in an unconventional light. Her work has appeared in English, Hungarian and German journals, including Grey Room and Modernism/Modernity, and in edited volumes including Bauhaus Imaginista (2019) and Von Kunst zu Leben: Die Ungarn am Bauhaus (2010). Her research engages the relationship between gender, design, architecture and photography; subjectivity and media image;
Michael White
is a Professor of History of Art at the University of York, where he specialises in the history of European avant-garde art, architecture and design. He is best known for his publications on De Stijl and Dada; this dual interest was initially prompted by his doctoral research on the artist Theo van Doesburg. His books include De Stijl and Dutch Modernism (2003) and Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-garde and the First World War (2013). A longside these volumes, he published many articles, catalogue contributions, and essays and organised exhibitions on artists such as Theo van Doesburg, George Grosz, Piet Mondrian and Kurt Schwitters. His current research projects focus on the legacies of the avant-gardes and the intersections between art and law.