Horváth Sándor

Sándor Horváth, Principal Investigator (PI) of the WORK project; Head of Department of Contemporary History, Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities (Budapest, Hungary) My research has been mainly concerned with East Central European history from the 1940s to the last decades of the twentieth century. Like many others, I was firstly interested in the everyday life of ordinary people during the Stalinization process. My doctoral thesis explored the life in the first socialist city in Hungary, and the ways, how Stalin-City (Sztálinváros) and the socialist regime were built and stabilized not only by the state but also by the people in their everyday relationships (published in English, Stalinism Reloaded: Everyday Stalincity in Hungary by Indiana University Press). This research led me on to develop a wider interest to understand the everyday negotiations in different communities using micro-historical approaches, including the youth in the 1960s (Children of Communism), the everyday practices of social policy and the language referring to social justice (Two Floors of Happiness), and the everyday cooperation (and collaboration) of different social groups (Denunciation). I have published a number of books and articles which have looked more generally the social and cultural history of the twentieth-century, everyday life, social identities and inequalities, youth history, socialist cities, social policy. I have been the PI of several large scale international and national research projects including COURAGE – “Cultural Opposition – Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries“ (funded by the European Commission’s Horizon2020 program ) which was a great experience to work with 12 research institutes and universities from 10 countries, with over 100 researchers, and this project has received numerous international awards and prizes: http://cultural-opposition.eu/ (Euronews summary of the project on the website).

Keywords: everyday life, workers, workplace, workers' councils

I also serve as the founding editor of The Hungarian Historical Review (www.hunghist.org) since 2012, a peer-reviewed international quarterly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. I have been visiting lecturer and supervisor of doctoral students at Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Humanities since 2005. I have been the recipient of several prizes and fellowships, including the Péter Hanák Prize (2001); Humboldt University, Berlin (2002); a fellowship at Columbia University, New York (2007); a Mellon fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna (2009); a fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU) (2011); at the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University, Berlin (2012), and at Imre Kertész Kolleg, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena (2014). My list of publications includes seven monographs, more than twenty articles and chapters in peer-reviewed international journals and collections of studies; eleven edited volumes and special issues of journals. A complete list of publications at mtmt.

Selected publications:

  • Children of Communism: Politicizing Youth Revolt in Communist Budapest in the 1960s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022.
  • The Handbook of COURAGE: Cultural Opposition and its Heritage in Eastern Europe. Budapest: Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2018. (ed. together with Balázs Apor, Péter Apor)
  • Kulturális ellenállás a Kádár-korszakban: Gyűjtemények története. Budapest: MTA BTK Történettudományi Intézet, 2018. (szerk. közösen)
  • Stalinism Reloaded: Everyday Life in Stalin-City, Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
  • Feljelentés: Egy ügynök mindennapjai. Budapest: Libri Kiadó 2017.
  • Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe New York – London: Anthem Press, 2017. (ed together with Péter Apor, James Mark)
  • Két emelet boldogság. Mindennapi szociálpolitika Budapesten a Kádár-korban [Two floors of happiness. Everyday social policy in Budapest during the Kádár era]. Budapest 2012, 266 p.
  • Kádár gyermekei. Ifjúsági lázadás a hatvanas években. Budapest: Nyitott Könyvműhely Kiadó, 2009.
  • Mindennapok Rákosi és Kádár korában: Új utak a szocialista korszak kutatásában. Budapest: Nyitott Könyvműhely Kiadó, 2008. (szerk.)
  • A kapu és a határ: mindennapi Sztálinváros. Bp., MTA TTI, 2004.