Transnational Art as Dissidence: Hungarian Artists’ Responses to WWI

Eszter Balázs is a historian specializing in the social and cultural history of World War I and its aftermath. Since 2022, she has served as a senior researcher at the Institute of Central European Studies, Eötvös József Research Center at Ludovika University, Budapest. Between 2017 and 2022, she led the project Kassák Lajos’s Avant-Garde Periodicals from an Interdisciplinary Approach (1915–1928) at the Kassák Museum and the Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest. She earned her PhD in History and European Civilization from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and Eötvös Lóránd University (Budapest), with a dissertation titled “En tête des intellectuels”. Les écrivains et la question de la liberté et de l’autonomie littéraires (1908–1914) [“Leading Critical Intellectuals: Debates on Literary Autonomy and Liberty in the Emblematic Review of Hungarian Literary Modernism, Nyugat, 1908–1914”]. She is currently a Fulbright research scholar at George Washington University.