Contemporary Budapest: Politics, Conflict & Culture

Edina currently works as the Head of the Museum Education Department at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery. Since 2006 she has served as a museum educator and has run the volunteer guide program. Through her work with the museum she gives lectures on art history, trains volunteer guides, and regularly conducts museum tours for the general public and museum professionals. A native of Hungary, Edina has lived in several countries, including Austria, Scotland, and the United States. She holds two MA degrees, one in history and the other in cultural history. As part of her scholarly work she has published articles on Hungarian history and museum education, and has been writing and editing educational publications in Hungarian and English, including exhibition, family, and audio guides.

Eszter Susán holds in MA in the Theory of Art and is an active member of the Jewish youth community in Budapest. For the past four years she has done extensive research on the past history and present culture of Budapest's Jewish community.

Szonja is a research fellow at the Institute of Minority Studies at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and teaches at the Department of Assyriology and Hebrew at the ELTE University in Budapest. She lived and studied in Budapest, Oxford, Jerusalem and New York, holds MA degrees in English Studies and Jewish Studies from ELTE University in Budapest, and an MSt in Jewish Studies and a DPhil in Modern Languages / Yiddish from the University of Oxford. Her main field of research and interest is Hungarian Jewish history and cultural history, and she is especially intrigued by issues related to changes in national identity and language choice. She has lectured and published extensively in her field, in English, Hungarian, Hebrew and Yiddish. As a native of Budapest and as a tour guide, she is interested in the various layers of the city – historical, social and architectural alike.