Balazs Trencsenyi is a historian of East Central European political and cultural thought. In many ways, he is the product of the unique intellectual atmosphere of CEU, not only in institutional sense, but also in terms of representing the generation of Eastern European historians who came to maturity after 1989, seeking to transcend the traditional nation-centered frameworks of scholarship and to come to terms with the multiple layers of intertwining pasts in the region, placing all this into a common European framework. Both his Ph.D. dissertation (which sought to compare the Hungarian and British discourses of collective identity in the early-modern period, looking at the “discourses of nationhood” before modern nationalism) and his subsequent research on the discourses of historicity and national specificity in interwar Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary in the context of the changing European cultural and political atmosphere after 1918, were based on a synoptic perspective seeking to reconstruct the East Central European intellectual phenomena in a multi-layered comparative setting.
Sponsored by the Havighurst Center
