Instructor(s):
The aim of this course cluster is to provide a multidisciplinary introduction to Hungarian culture, with a particular focus on Budapest, its history, and everyday life. Through film, music, and urban studies, students explore cultural, social, and historical perspectives from past to present.
This course cluster consists of three 2-credit courses:
- Hungary through Hungarian Cinema
- Hungarian Music in a Central European Context
- Budapest Studies: Life and Culture of a City and Its Dwellers
Students who complete any two of the three courses may opt to receive 4 culture credits under the course title Hungarian Culture – Past and Present on their transcript. Alternatively, the courses may also be taken individually, in which case each course is worth 2 credits and will appear separately on the transcript.
For detailed syllabuses, please refer to the individual course listings (see the hyperlinks above).
Instructors' bio:
Anna Gács is a critic and translator. She studied literature and art theory. Her research interests include contemporary literature, digitalisation and literary culture, literary and media theory, and contemporary autobiographic culture. She is an associate professor at the Department for Sociology and Communication, Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In 1999-2000 she was the Hungarian lector at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College of London. From 2015 to 2018 she was the president of Szépírók Társasága (Hungarian Society of Writers, Critics and Literary Translators). In 2015 she won the Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Lóránt Péteri (born 1976), musicologist, has been lecturing at AIT since the Autumn of 2011. He is professor and head of the Musicology Department of the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Gustav Mahler Research Centre (Toblach), of the Council of the Hungarian Musicological Society, and of the Musicological Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has given papers about the music culture of state socialist Hungary and about the music of Gustav Mahler in international conferences (in Bristol, Brno, Budapest, Canterbury, Cardiff, Dobbiaco, Guildford, New York, Pittsburgh, Radziejowice, and Wrocław). Among his latest contributions is his chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification (2020).
Mariann Schiller is a secondary school teacher and teacher trainer in one of the most prestigious grammar schools in Budapest run by L. Eötvös University. Apart from teaching youngsters she is active in mentoring and educating teachers in a teachers’ association and occasionally at university. She is also the editor of several teaching materials. She has been active in developing new ways of teaching Hungarian. For years she was responsible for the national board of the European Youth Parliament. She is a true Budapest dweller: born, brought up, and has been living in downtown in historic buildings.
