Public Lecture - Hungary: Political Leadership Cults from Emperor Franz Joseph to the present day

About his upcoming lecture Balázs Apor writes: "The lecture will explore the ever-recurring phenomenon of the leader cult in modern Hungarian history from the rule of Franz Joseph in the late 19th century to the present day. "It will investigate the reasons for the endurance and constant recurrence of the cult despite the radical ruptures in Hungarian history and the emergence of five different political regimes (dynastic, right-wing authoritarian, communist dictatorship, democratic, hybrid) in the past 150 years. "The lecture will introduce the key images that were associated with the leader in each regime, and will highlight the most important political functions the cult performed in modern Hungarian history. "It will focus mostly on the Hungarian specificities of the phenomenon, but will argue for the importance of leader cults in understanding how historical legacies evolve, accumulate and became entangled with each other." Dr Balázs Apor is a historian of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th Century, with a special focus on the Communist period. His research interests include the study of propaganda and symbolic politics under Communist rule, and the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe after the Second World War. He has a particular interest in the study of leader cults, the invention and dissemination of socialist myths and the functioning of rituals in Soviet-type societies. He is currently Associate Professorin European Studies in the Centre for European Studies and the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at Trinity College Dublin.