Contact us
Send all enquiries, comments etc. to hungarian.studies[at]googlemail.com
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Like the Sunday Circle (see below), our informal meetings feature some of the most prominent minds of the day discussing anything and everything of interest, except we meet on Fridays (and sometimes Thursdays), and have a website. At present, we meet on Thursdays at 6pm in the wine bar on the first floor of the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1B 5BB. Please check this site in advance for details of weekly activities, or e-mail us.
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Who we are …
Daniel Abondolo is Senior Lecturer in Hungarian Studies at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL-SSEES). His research interests include Hungarian and comparative metrics, translation, the evolution of literary norms, the description and reconstruction of Uralic languages and the isolates of Eurasia.
Gwen Jones is Research Associate at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, UCL. She holds a doctorate on the early twentieth-century prose fiction of Budapest, and has taught Hungarian literature at BA and MA level at UCL-SSEES. She maintains this site.
Peter Sherwood, Laszlo Birinyi, Sr., Distinguished Professor in Hungarian Language and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, formerly Hon. Senior Lecturer in Hungarian Language and Literature and (College) Teacher in Hungarian at UCL-SSEES. London. Peter has also lectured in Ob-Ugrian Studies and General Linguistics, and taught in Budapest, Debrecen, Szeged and Rome.
Eszter Tarsoly is Teaching Fellow in Hungarian Language, and a research student at UCL-SSEES. Her doctoral thesis explores questions of language planning, linguistic purism, and ideologies of language with special regard to Hungary and the circum-Pannonian region.
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The Sunday Circle (Vasárnapi kör) was a group of young philosophers, musicians and artists whose weekly meetings provided a forum to discuss questions of ethics and aesthetics, from 1915 to 1919. The group centred on Georg Lukács, and also included Károly (Karl) Mannheim, Béla Balázs, Leo Popper and Anna Lesznai.
A number of Sunday Circle members wrote of their involvement: Béla Balázs in Unmögliche Menschen (Impossible People, 1930), later published in Hungarian as Lehetetlen emberek (Impossible People, 1965); Emma Ritoók in A szellem kalandorai (Adventurers of the Spirit, 1921). The standard monograph on the Sunday Circle is A vasárnapi kör, ed. by Éva Karádi and Erzsébet Vezér, Budapest, Gondolat, 1980. Recommended in English is Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and his Generation 1900-1918, Cambridge MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1985.
An early twentieth century kávéház, coffee house, the Centrál:
Centrál