Balász Trencsènyi
Assistant Professor, History Department, Central European University
His main areas of interest are East-Central European history of political ideas, early-modern intellectual history, comparative historiography, and methodology of history-writing.
He studied at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (M.A. in Philosophy, 1997), and at the Central European University Budapest (M.A. in Nationalism Studies, 1998; Ph.D. in Comparative History 2004). His doctoral dissertation compared the Hungarian and British discourses of nationhood in the early-modern period. He has been a research student at the University of Cambridge, King's College (1999-2000); Associate Fellow of the NEXUS Project at CAS, Sofia (2001-2002); Junior Visiting Fellow at IWM, Vienna (2002), and Andrew W. Mellon-Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2003). He has been a founding member of the international research group “Regional Identity Discourses in Central and Southeast Europe (1775-1945),” and is editing a four-volume collection of key texts thematizing collective identity in the region. He participated in the “Religion, Law and Philosophy: European Political Thought 1450-1700,” project, launched by Howell Lloyd and Glenn Burgess (co-writing, with László Kontler, the Hungarian chapter of the collective volume to be published by Yale UP in 2008). He is coordinator of the “CEU-HESP Comparative History Project”, which aims at reconsidering the state of the art of comparative and trans-national historiography in East-Central Europe. He initiated and coordinates the project, “The Intellectual History of Patriotism and the Legacy of Composite States in East-Central Europe,” supported by the CEU Research Board. Currently, he is finishing a monograph on the discourses of historicity and “national character” in inter-war Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary in the context of the changing European cultural and political atmosphere after 1918.
He also serves as Associate Editor of the periodical East Central Europe/L’Europe du Centre-Est (from 2005) and as co-editor of the Hungarian cultural periodical 2000 (from 2003).
His publications include:
Books:
Balázs Trencsényi, Dragoş Petrescu, Cristina Petrescu, Constantin Iordachi, and Zoltán Kántor eds., Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian and Hungarian Case Studies (Budapest/Iaşi: Regio Books/Polirom, 2001).
Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček, eds., Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1775-1945): Texts and Commentaries, Volume I: Late Enlightenment. Emergence of the Modern ‘National Idea’ (Budapest: CEU Press, 2006).
Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček, eds., Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1775-1945): Texts and Commentaries, Volume II: National Romanticism. The Formation of National Movements (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007).
Sorin Antohi, Balázs Trencsényi and Péter Apor eds., Narratives Unbound: Historical studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007).
A politka nyelvei. Eszmetörténeti tanulmányok (The Languages of Politics. Studies in Intellectual History) (Budapest: Argumentum, 2007).
Book chapters and articles:
"Reason Without State: Modalities of Political Community and the Adaptation of Ragion di Stato in the Works of Miklós Zrínyi," in: Prudenza Civile, Bene Comune, Guerra Giusta. Percorsi della Ragion di Stato tra Seicento e Settecento, ed. by Gianfranco Borrelli, (Naples: Archivio della Ragion di Stato - Adarte, 1999), pp. 49-76.
„The ‘Münchausenian Moment’: Modernity, Liberalism and Nationalism in the Thought of Ştefan Zeletin” in: Balázs Trencsényi, Constantin Iordachi, Zoltán Kántor, Cristina Petrescu, and Dragoş Petrescu, eds., Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian and Hungarian Case Studies (Budapest/Iaşi: Regio Books/Polirom, 2001) pp. 61-81.
“Conceptualizations of Statehood and Nationhood: The Hungarian Reception of Reason of State and the Political Languages of National Identity in the Early Modern Period,” in: East-Central Europe, vol 29. part 1-2., 2002 Autumn, pp. 1-26.
Constantin Iordachi and Balázs Trencsényi: “In Search of a Usable Past: The Question of National Identity in Romanian Studies, 1990-2000,” (East European Politics and Societies) (2003/3), pp. 415-453.
“Conceptual History and Political Languages: On the Central-European Adaptation of the Contextualist-Conceptualist Methodologies of Intellectual History” in: Petr Roubal and Václav Veber, eds., Prague Perspectives. Studies in Central and Eastern Europe (Prague: Klementinum, 2004).
Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi, and Balázs Trencsényi: “Why Bother About Historical Regions? Debates Over Central Europe in Hungary, Poland and Romania,” in: East Central Europe, 2005/1-2., pp. 5-58.