Kristóf Nagy is an art historian and sociologist at the Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI), working on a research project on the Art of Hungary and Eastern Europe in the 1980s. He is currently finishing his PhD at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the CEU. In 2019 he curated the exhibition Left Turn, Right Turn – Artistic and Political Radicalism under Late Socialism at the Blinken OSA Archives with Márton Szarvas.
His research has been published extensively in international journals and edited volumes. He is a member of the Helyzet Working Group for Public Sociology and serves as an editor of the journal of social theory Fordulat. In 2022 he edited its Culture & Capitalism special issue. Since this year, he has been an assistant lecturer at the Eötvös Loránd University, teaching courses on the intersections of culture and society.
His research proposed in the framework of the Understanding 1989 in East-Central European Art seminars origins from the PhD Thesis he is currently. The dissertation project examines the cultural politics of the Orbán-regime through the ethnography of the Hungarian Academy of Arts by approaching it from the critical political economy of the socialist and post-socialist periods.
In the framework of this seminar series, he will map the late-socialist origins of this ethnonationalist Academy. In this project, he will approach the Academy’s roots from the years of the transition as a case to map how nation and nationalism blossomed in the art scenes of the post-socialist transition.