András Bozóki is Professor at the Department of Political Science at the Central European University. His main fields of research include democratization, de-democratization, political regimes, ideologies, Central European politics, and the role of intellectuals.

He is a research affiliate at the CEU Democracy Institute. He was president of the Hungarian Political Science Association (2003-2005). He also served as the chairman of the Political Science Committee at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2011-2017). 

He was visiting professor at Columbia University ( Deák Chair in 2004, 2009, 2015), Smith College (1999-2000), Mount Holyoke College (2000), Hampshire College (2000), Nottingham University (1993), Tübingen University (1999, 2001), Bologna University (2008), Ljubljana University (2013), and he also taught at his native Eötvös Loránd University (1983-2020).

András Bozóki has been an Andrew Mellon fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin (1993-1994).  He was a Jean Monnet fellow and later Fernand Braudel fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence (2000-2001 and 2012).  He worked as visiting fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of California (UCLA) in Los Angeles (1988-1989), at the Sussex European Institute in Brighton (1997-1998), at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Wassenaar (1998), at the Institute for Advanced Study at CEU in Budapest (2014, 2022), and at the Institute for Humane Sciences (IWM) in Vienna (1990-1991 and 2018).  

He was the recipient of the 2009 István Bibó Prize. He is Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (DSc).

His books in English (authored and co-authored) include Rolling Transition and the Role of Intellectuals: The Case of Hungary (2022), Hungary Turns Its Back on Europe (I: 2020, II: 2022), 25 Years after the Fall of Iron Curtain: The State of Integration (2014), Diversity and the European Public Sphere (2010), Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (2006), The Future of Democracy in Europe (2004), Migrants, Minorities, Belonging and Citizenship (2003),  Post-Communist Transition: Emerging Pluralism in Hungary (1992, 2016), The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy (2002), The Communist Successor Parties in Central and Eastern Europe (2002), Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (1999), and Democratic Legitimacy in Post-Communist Societies (1994).
 
In Hungarian language, his authored books include Gördülő rendszerváltás (Rolling Transition, 2019), Virtuális köztársaság (Virtual Republic, 2012), Cenzorok helyett fekvőrendőrök (Speed Humps instead of Censors, 2012), Ars Politica (2007), Politikai pluralizmus Magyarországon (Political Pluralism in Hungary, 2003), Magyar panoptikum (Hungarian Waxworks, 1996), Konfrontáció és konszezus: a demokratizálás stratégiái (Confrontation and Consensus: Strategies for Democratization, 1994) and others.
 
His edited books include a major work in which he served as editor-in-chief and co-editor of the 8-volumes series: A rendszerváltás forgatókönyve: Kerekasztal-tárgyalások 1989-ben (The Script of the Regime Change: Roundtable Talks in 1989, 1999-2000). Further (co-)edited books include: Anarchism (1991), Anarchism Today (1994), Hungarian Anarchism (1998), and Classical Anarchism (2009), just as the selection from the writings of Béla Zsolt (1992) Paul Ignotus (2010), and from the interwar journal Szép Szó (1987). 
 
His articles have appeared in Democratization, East European Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Sociology, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, East European Politics and Societies, European Political Science, East European Constitutional Review, Central European Political Science Review, Hungarian Studies, Osteuropa, Baltic Worlds, Hungarian Quarterly, Berliner Debatte, Europäische Rundschau, Czech Sociological Review, Hungarian Political Science Review, Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, Transit, Visegrad Insight etc. His writings were published in seven languages.

András Bozóki was a founding editor of the Hungarian Political Science Review, and has been serving as member of the editorial associates of the European Political Science, East European Quarterly, Journal of Political Science Education, Baltic Worlds, Constellations, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Intersections, European Journal of Transformation Studies, Research in Social Change.

In 1989, András Bozóki participated at the national roundtable negotiations. In 2005-6, he served as Minister of Culture of Hungary.

Elżbieta Korolczuk is an Associate professor in sociology working at Södertörn University in Stockholm and American Studies Center, Warsaw University. Her research interests involve: social movements, civil society, politics of reproduction as well as right-wing populism and mobilizations against “gender”. She co-edited two books on motherhood and fatherhood in Poland and Russia (in Polish) and published two volumes on social movements and civil society in Central Eastern Europe: Civil Society Revisited: Lessons from Poland co-edited with Kerstin Jacobsson (Berghahn Books, 2017), Rebellious Parents. Parental Movements in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia co-edited with Katalin Fábián (Indiana University Press, 2017). Most recent publications include an edited volume Bunt kobiet. Czarne Protesty i Strajki Kobiet [Women’s Rebellion. Black Protests and Women’s Strikes] co-authored with Beata Kowalska, Jennifer Ramme and Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez (European Solidarity Centre, 2019) and a monograph Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment written with Agnieszka Graff (2021, Routledge). She is also a commentator and a long-time women’s and human rights activist. 

Michael H. Bernhard is the inaugural holder of the Raymond and Miriam Ehrlich Eminent Scholar Chair in Political Science at the University of Florida. Since June 1, 2017 he has assumed the responsibility of editor-in-chief of Perspectives on Politics. 

Bernhard’s academic work centers on questions of democratization and development both globally and in the context of Europe. Among the issues that have figured prominently in his research agenda are the role of civil society in democratization, institutional choice in new democracies, the political economy of democratic survival, and the legacy of extreme forms of dictatorship. He recently finished up a stint as a co-PI on the research side of the Varieties of Democracy project and is responsible for its batteries on civil society and state sovereignty.

Prior to coming to Florida, Bernhard was on the faculty of Penn State University for twenty years. He has also been a visiting researcher at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at Warsaw University and the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He has delivered public lectures at a large number of public and private universities in the North America, Asia, and Europe, and has conducted archival and field work in Poland, Germany, England, and Hungary.

In his career Bernhard has held a number of important administrative responsibilities — chair of the APSA section on European Politics and Society, chair of the Network on the Historical Study of States and Regimes of the Council on European Studies, member of the editorial board of Penn State Press, and the chair of the editorial committee of the newsletter of the comparative democratization section of the American Political Science Association.

Bernhard received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and has graduate degrees from Yale (M.A. Russian and East European Studies), and Columbia (Ph.D. Political Science). He has taken short-term courses of study at the Louis Kossuth University in Debrecen (Hungary), Jagellonian University in Krakow (Poland), the Catholic University of Lublin (Poland), and Goethe Institute in Boppard am Rhein (Germany).

Julia Sonnevend is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications at The New School for Social Research. She is a sociologist of culture; her comparative and interdisciplinary publications argue that much of global culture rests on the unexpected, not on the planned. A major international event can shake the world and the emergence of a charismatic new politician on the global stage can alter our lives. Just consider that almost nobody saw the earthshaking changes of 1989 coming even a few years beforehand, or the genuine shock political scientists felt as they failed to predict the outcome of the 2016 elections in the United States. We all desire to understand and describe our experiences in rational terms, and somehow predict and assess the future to come. But despite our best efforts we are still swayed by powerful feelings, exceptional representations, and magnetic people; we all confront moments that simply do not fit into neat boxes. Sonnevend’s work argues that contemplating these unexpected, non-rational features of human existence can lead to a better understanding of political, social, and communicative processes worldwide. Perhaps influenced by her Eastern-European upbringing by two librarians in Hungary during a jarring political transformation, she is skeptical of progress narratives and technological enthusiasm, and has a particular fondness for understanding failures and ruptures of communication and culture worldwide.

Her first book, Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event (Oxford University Press, 2016) raised the question: How we can tell the story of an event in a way that people would remember it internationally and over time? In this book, Sonnevend developed a new concept of “global iconic events,” defined as news events that the international media cover extensively and remember ritually. Focusing on journalists covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and on subsequent retellings of the event (from Legoland reenactments to the installation of segments of the Berlin Wall in shopping malls), she discussed how storytellers build up certain events so that people remember them for long periods of time. The East German border opening that we now summarize as the “fall of the Berlin Wall” was in fact unintentional, confusing, and prompted in part by misleading media coverage of bureaucratic missteps. But its global message is not about luck or accident or happenstance in history. Incarnated as a global iconic event, the “fall of the Berlin Wall” has come to communicate the momentary power that vulnerable ordinary people can have. This powerful myth still shapes our debates about separation walls and fences, borders and refugees worldwide. In contrast to globalization theories that focus on the metaphor of a “bridge,” her book highlights the ongoing presence of separation walls and barriers around the world.

While Sonnevend’s first book focused on magical events in our international imagination, her next book, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Capture Our Hearts, Minds and Politics (under advance contract with Princeton University Press), will consider a magical quality in human relations. Bringing together sociology, performance studies, political science and international relations, it will analyze the importance of “charm” in global politics. Through case studies of liberal, illiberal and authoritarian political leaders from North Korea to Iran to New Zealand to Hungary, she considers how we can translate the everyday, in-person magic of charm to contemporary mediated and fragmented political environments. Updating Max Weber’s hundred-year-old charisma concept, Sonnevend argues that “charm” has become one of the keywords of contemporary global politics. As we increasingly turn our attention to political personalities in contrast to parties, policies and institutions, the seductive and deceptive powers of mediated political charm need careful consideration and dedicated scholarly and public attention.

Her graduate students work on a wide-range of topics in relation to global culture, including South Korea’s covid-response, the representation of “peace” in Israeli-Palestinian television shows, the culture of binge-watching in Chile and the United States, the Coca Cola company’s role in fostering independent music in Pakistan and Chinese artists’ coping with anti-Asian sentiment in New York.

Sonnevend received her PhD in Communications from Columbia University, her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School, and her Juris Doctorate and Master of Arts degrees in German Studies and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University Budapest.

Please view her Research Matters profile for more information about  Sonnevend’s work.

She tweets from @juliasonnevend

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology Emeritus at The New School for Social Research.

He is the author of dozens of articles and eight books, including Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture versus the Culture of Power, The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times and Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society. He is the founder of the online magazine Public Seminar and the convener of The Democracy Seminar, first developed in the 1980s as an exchange between oppositionist groups in Central Europe and the United States, and in 2018 reconvened as a “World Wide Committee of Democratic Correspondence.”

 
Goldfarb lived in Poland in 1973-4 doing the research for his dissertation on Polish Student Theater. He collaborated with the democratic opposition before Solidarnosc and worked with Solidarnosc both above and below ground in the 1980s. Since 1989, he has annually returned to Poland to teach in an institute on Democracy and Diversity. For his work in Poland, he received the Solidarity Medal, presented by former President Lech Walesa, on behalf of the Polish government, in recognition of support for Solidarity, commemorating its 25th anniversary, September 28, 2005, and the Medal of Gratitude, from the European Solidarity Centre, Gdansk, Poland, 2012. 

I am currently working on the rise of right-wing populism in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. While partially based in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University College London, I co-supervise two large international projects financed by the European Commission. For more information, please consult here. FATIGUE is designed to train 15 doctoral students, while the POPREBEL's goal is to develop a new intepretation and explanation of the rise of populism, particularly its right-wing variety. The first fruits of my own work in this area are an article on the cultural side of the right-wing populist mobilization in Poland, an article on the relationship between populism and nostalgia, and a blog entry. POPREBEL has a working paper series that I co-edit.

In 2020 I served as the elected President of ASEES (The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies).

After studying sociology and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and several years of teaching in the Department of Sociology there, I earned my doctoral degree in anthropology from Columbia University. What am I doing in political science? The answer can be found in my main intellectual passion. As long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the relationship between power and culture, an area that is located at an intersection of several academic disciplines. Later, I developed the lasting interest in social movements and protest politics, again a rather interdisciplinary area of study. My interest in the complex interplay between power (politics) and culture was solidified and became a bit of an obsession in 1980-1, while I was living through the exhilarating experience of the first Solidarity period in Poland. Two bools books, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power and Anthropology and Political Science (with Myron Aronoff) are the best exemplifications of my approach. I study politics and culture comparatively, but the principal “source” of my observations and data is Poland and East Central Europe. I draw on my own empirical work in this region and regular collaborations with social scientists who work in and on Eastern Europe.

I have been associated with Rutgers since the early 1990s, but spent almost three years (2015-17) in London, directing the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at University College London.

During the last few years I have also returned to my earlier interest in the philosophy and methodology of social sciences (particularly interpretive and ethnographic approaches) and contributed to this area through teaching, writing, and participation in conferences and workshops.

My research is concentrated in three fields: (1) civil society, social movements, and protest politics, (2) the relationship between politics and culture (including the politics of historical memory), and (3) democratization, particularly in the context of post-communist transformations. I draw on these three areas in my recent work on right-wing populism.

Please see the full bio here.