(2025 Update: I wrote the following lines as a Ph.D. Candidate at NYU (2019-2024).)
Refugees. While, fortunately, I’m not one of them, I’m interested in and care about their experiences and the challenges they have faced in the societies that have hosted them throughout human history. I have been a foreigner myself for the past seven years since I left the country where I was born and raised. I chose to go abroad because instead of being “just a tourist”, I wanted to spend more than just a few days or weeks to learn about other people and their cultures. I didn’t have to go, but I wanted to, and I suppose as the years passed, I grew accustomed to the idea of living abroad, and staying ended up feeling normal. I didn’t flee and never really experienced hostility during my years-long residence in the countries I chose. However, I did learn what it feels like to be different and an outsider, even if the discrimination I received was overwhelmingly positive and benefited me. Researching the “expatriate experience” and the relationship between the host society and diaspora communities, as well as foreign individuals, originated from my personal experiences.
I was born in the land of former Habsburgia*, in one of the numerous successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: the Republic of Hungary (1989-2012). I was raised in Hungarian culture, learned Magyar as my mother tongue, and have always been conscious of my family’s mixed Western Slavic and German ethnic origins – a legacy of a diverse empire in Central Europe. I learned modern Hungarian and East-Central European history at Eötvös Lóránd University (ELTE), which later provided an excellent foundation for the courses I took on Eastern Europe in the first two years of my doctoral program at New York University (NYU).
I also had the opportunity to live in China for five years. The originally planned six-month course in Mandarin and the short-term adventure turned out to be one of the most formative periods of my life, as well as a chance to earn my Master’s degree in modern Chinese history at Nankai University. I learned the language well enough to conduct research and write my thesis on Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war in China during World War One. After graduation, when I decided to leave Tianjin, the city that became a second home to me, I took the topic with me and crossed Eurasia and the Atlantic two years ago to live and pursue my Ph.D. in New York City.
In the fall of 2019, I returned to China to resume my dissertation research, where I had left off after defending my Master’s thesis. I spent three months conducting archival research, engaging with local scholars, and preparing my dissertation proposal. My three-month research trip was supported by the ACLS/Luce Foundation’s pre-dissertation travel grant and NYU’s GRI program . I spent my time both in residence as a graduate fellow at NYU Shanghai and visiting archival sites across the country.
Since my return to the U.S. and the successful defense of the proposal in November 2019, I have posted updates to this blog from New York, or wherever my research requires me to go.
*By this invented playful name, I refer to the empire of the Austrian Habsburgs (1526-1918), also known in its latest formation as Austria-Hungary (1867-1918).
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