The Center for the American Experience in collaboration with The New School Department of Sociology is proud to present the launch of Professor Virág Molnár's new book, Marketing Radicalism: The Cultural Production of Far-Right Populism in Contemporary Hungary (Princeton University Press). Join us for an inspiring night of conversation between Professor Molnár and Heuss Visiting Professor in Sociology Professor Manuela Boatcǎ on this new book and its timely significance in America, with an introduction from CAE co-director Professor Julia Sonnevend.
Attacks on iconic public institutions such as the Kennedy Center or the Smithsonian, political interventions into university curricula, book bans curbing free speech in public schools, expanding restrictions on LGBTQ+ and Transgender rights, and dismantling of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies illustrate the political centrality of culture wars in the Trump era.
Marketing Radicalism is a book that promises new insights into such struggles, as it moves away from a focus on political parties and electoral politics to highlighting the significance of culture wars, identity politics, culture industries and popular culture in the rise of far-right populism. Looking at such domains as fashion, book publishing, tourism and martial arts, the book shows how the culture industries create powerful narratives to reimagine the nation as a populist fantasyland, and how these narratives are used by far-right governments in their efforts to topple liberal norms.
While Marketing Radicalism focuses on Hungary under Viktor Orbán, it emphasizes how Orbán provided an ideological blueprint for far-right populist politicians – and a cautionary tale for liberal democracies. It offers important lessons on the mainstreaming of right-wing popular culture, the importance of markets in circulating far-right identity narratives, and the political mobilization of cultural traditions for geopolitical reorientation.
Presented by Center for the American Experience at The New School and The New School Department of Sociology.
Virág Molnár received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University and is currently Associate Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. Her research explores the intersections of culture, politics, social change and knowledge production with special focus on urban culture and transformations of the built environment. She has written about the relationship between architecture and state formation in socialist and postsocialist Eastern Europe, the post-1989 reconstruction of Berlin, and the new housing landscape of postsocialist cities.
Julia Sonnevend is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications and Co-Director of the Center for the American Experience at The New School. She is incoming Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication, the flagship journal of the International Communication Association. A scholar of media, democracy, and culture, her research explores the subtle yet powerful forces—such as “event,” “charm,” and “courage”—that shape the narratives and collective experiences that define us.
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Virág Molnár received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University and is currently Associate Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. Her research explores the intersections of culture, politics, social change and knowledge production with special focus on urban culture and transformations of the built environment. She has written about the relationship between architecture and state formation in socialist and postsocialist Eastern Europe, the post-1989 reconstruction of Berlin, and the new housing landscape of postsocialist cities.
Her book, Building the State: Architecture, Politics and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe, has been published by Routledge and received the Mary Douglas Prize for the Best Book in the Sociology of Culture from the American Sociological Association in 2014. Her work has also appeared in the American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Urban Studies. She has been a visiting fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and the Department of Sociology at Harvard University and at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship.She is currently working on a book, Marketing Radicalism: The Cultural Production of Populism in Contemporary Hungary, as well as projects examining the impact of new communications technologies on the urban public sphere through a comparative study of the street art scene in New York, Berlin and Budapest; and the politics of urban rodent control.
Manuela Boatcă is the 2026-2027 Theodor Heuss Visiting Professor in Sociology at The New School for Social Research.
She is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She has a degree in English and German philology from the University of Bucharest, Romania and a PhD in sociology from the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany. She was Visiting Professor at IUPERJ, Rio de Janeiro in 2007/08 and Professor of Sociology of Global Inequalities at the Latin American Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin from 2012 to 2015. She has published widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Manuela writes in English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Romanian. Her work has also been translated into Hungarian, Italian, Russian, and Swedish. She is the author of Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism (Routledge, 2016), Laboratoare ale modernității. Europa de Est și America Latină în (co)relație (IDEA, 2020) and the co-editor (with E. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez and S. Costa) of Decolonizing European Sociology. Transdisciplinary Approaches (Ashgate, 2010) and (with A. Komlosy and H.-H. Nolte) of Global Inequalities in World-Systems Perspective (Routledge 2017). Together with Anca Parvulescu, she co-authored Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania across Empires (Cornell UP, 2022), which was translated into Romanian (Editura ULBS, 2024) and German (transcript Verlag, 2025) and received the René Wellek Prize of the Modern Language Association and the Barrington Moore Award of the American Sociological Association's Section on Historical and Comparative Sociology.
JULIA SONNEVEND is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications and Co-Director of the Center for the American Experience at The New School. She is incoming Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication, the flagship journal of the International Communication Association. A scholar of media, democracy, and culture, her research explores the subtle yet powerful forces—such as “event,” “charm,” and “courage”—that shape the narratives and collective experiences that define us.
She is the author of Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024; Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event; and co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Time, NPR, BBC Newshour, The Times Literary Supplement, Teen Vogue, Times Higher Education, and Bloomberg News, among others.
Her scholarly work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, The International Journal of Press/Politics, Media, Culture & Society, and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. She co-edits the forum section of the Journal of Communication, the flagship journal of the International Communication Association.
Sonnevend has held fellowships at institutions worldwide, including Freie Universität Berlin, Central European University in Budapest, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Raised by two librarians in Budapest during Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, she brings a lived perspective on political transformation to her interdisciplinary scholarship and institutional service. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an LL.M. from Yale Law School.
