Report: Hungarian Studies Association of Canada Annual Conference 2022

The Hungarian Studies Association of Canada / Association canadienne des études hongroises / Kanadai Magyarságtudományi Társaság (HSAC) held its 2022 annual conference from May 14–16 as part of the 2022 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences organized by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Canada. Citing continued challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 Congress and associated HSAC conference were once again held virtually. HSAC conference organizers seized on the advantages of this arrangement in allowing participants to attend the event online from anywhere in the world. Presenters and listeners attended from diverse locations including Canada, the United States, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Croatia, Estonia, and the United Kingdom.The Congress 2022 conference theme was “Transitions,” featuring an overarching program aimed at furthering the ideals of “equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization” and building “collaborative strategies to entrench these principles in our disciplines, institutions, [and] associations.”1 The Hungarian Studies Association of Canada adapted this theme for its own conference program, “Transitions: Hungary and Hungarians at Crossroads.” The call for papers invited presentations focused more narrowly on “equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization” as related to Hungarian Jewry, the Roma population, the legalization of homosexuality, and the fate of the Hungarian Germans, but also extended the theme to address “key moments in the history of Hungary and the Hungarians” from the medieval age to the present.2 Given that the call for papers also invited investigations of “any topic related to Hungary and Hungarian studies,” the resulting program was characterized by a high degree of diversity in the innovative research results that were shared, as well as in the presenters selected, who ranged from talented graduate students to seasoned scholars and well-known authorities.Dr. Ágnes Gagyi of the University of Gothenburg gave the conference keynote address on the topic “Hungary after 2008: A New Regime of World-Economic Integration,” wherein she discussed Hungary’s continued postsocialist transformation in the context of the global capitalist crisis. This event was complemented by a book roundtable on Zsuzsanna Varga’s The Hungarian Agricultural Miracle? Sovietization and Americanization in a Communist Country, published in 2021.3 The discussion included the contributions of historians Eszter Bartha from Eötvös Loránd University and Nigel Swain, an expert on Eastern Europe from the University of Liverpool, and was moderated by Steven Jobbitt of Lakehead University.The 2022 HSAC conference featured seven separate panels with a total of eighteen presentations on a diverse array of topics. In line with the conference themes, both “identity” and “transitions” served as primary concepts informing the panels, which included “Crossroads of Hungarian National Identity,” “Economic Transitions and the Novels of Zsigmond Móricz,” and “Vehicles of Transition in the Arts of Hungary.” In the first of these panels, Joseph W. Moser’s consideration of “Austrian and Hungarian Hybrid National Identities in the Holocaust” was complemented by Éva Pétras’s discussion of the embracing of progress on the part of the Hungarian nobility in the nineteenth century, which led to significant liberal “transitions” surrounding the 1848 Revolution, according to her analysis. While Móricz’s novels prompted useful conclusions on the part of panelists Virginia L. Lewis and Anita Káli regarding the failure of capitalism to accommodate the needs of the poor as suggested by his narratives, in the session on “the Arts” Nóra Lajtos discussed transitions from major to minor keys in compositions by Liszt, Bartók, and Kodály, and Borbála Kulin explored the encoding of theological concepts in the natural world as suggested by the poet János Pilinszky.Identity also served as the foundation for the panel “Modernity and Identity in Hungarian Spaces,” where Anikó Zsuzsanna Antal, Erzsébet Árvay, and Dorothy Barenscott delivered papers that considered modern constructs of identity and the interaction of these with government, capitalism, and modernity. Their papers prompted conclusions regarding how the manipulation and control of identity on the part of those in power compromises the agency of society’s members. The connection of identity to the publishing industry further extended listeners’ opportunity to consider the institutions and cultural practices that condition individual identity in the session “Recording Identity: Writers, Publishers, and the Shaping of Discourse,” with its contributions by Agatha Schwartz, Magdalena Garbacik-Balakowicz, and Ágnes Gálfalvi. This session addressed topics ranging from contemporary Hungarian publishing houses in Romania (Gálfalvi), to contemporary women writers in Hungary (Garbacik-Balakowicz), and female portrayals of Danube Swabian identity (Schwartz).The notion of “transitions” informed the papers given in the panel “Ottoman Influences in Hungarian History and Culture,” where Enikő Basa considered literary responses to the influences of Turkish and Austrian domination on Hungary’s national development in the post-Reformation era in her paper “Transitions in Hungarian Literature as a Response to the Ottoman Invasion.” Georg Michels in turn compared seventeenth-century relations of the Ukrainians and the Hungarians with the Ottoman Empire, while İlkay Kirişçioğlu shed new light on the 1848 Revolution and its aftermath with his discussion of the thousands of Hungarian émigrés to Turkey who followed the Ottoman invitation to adopt the creed of Islam.Finally, colonization formed the centerpiece of the panel “Geography and the Colonial Question in Modern Hungary,” with investigations by Róbert Győri, Ferenc Gyuris, and Steven Jobbitt that drew listeners’ attention to the manifestation of state-building as a colonial project not only beyond the nation’s borders, as in Győri’s presentation “Imperial Dreams and Hungarian Geography, 1867–1918” and Gyuris’s talk on “Late 19th-Century Hungarian Geographers on Overseas European Colonization,” but also internally, as explored by Jobbitt in “Hydrology and Empire: River Regulation as a Colonial Project in Pre-World War I Hungary.” The panel’s critical consideration of historical notions of “benevolent” versus “predatory” colonization shed valuable light on the nature of empire-building as an engine of social and economic transition within Hungary.The final event of the conference was a roundtable discussion entitled “Hungary and Ukraine, a Complex Relationship.” The multifaceted discussion was led by Emőke Szathmáry of the University of Manitoba, Georg Michels of the University of California, Riverside, Frank Sysyn of the University of Alberta, Susan Papp of the University of Toronto, and Sándor Földvári of the University of Debrecen, and was moderated by Oliver Botar of the University of Manitoba. This roundtable did worthy justice to the complexities that characterize the tensions existing among Hungarians and Ukrainians both currently and throughout the challenging history between these two nations, and it provided a rich and useful window onto the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia as well as the role played by Hungary as Ukraine’s neighbor.In sum, the 2022 conference of the Hungarian Studies Association of Canada demonstrated how a small scholarly organization can make substantial contributions to our understanding not just of the cultural, social, and historical complexity and dynamism of a modest nation of 10,000,000 people, but of global matters of great import to us all.

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