The Book Prize is awarded every two years by the Hungarian Studies Association for the most important contribution to Hungarian studies. Prof. Dr. Béla Bodó was awarded the prize at the association’s convention during the annual meeting of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEES). It is endowed with a cash prize.
Bodó's monograph “The White Terror: Antisemitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919-1921” examines the movement of a right-wing militia known as the White Terror, which for two years after the First World War actively tracked down, tortured, and murdered members of the Jewish community as well as former supporters of the short-lived Council Republic. On the basis of this example it can be argued that the program of this movement, based on virulent anti-Semitism, laid the foundation for Hungarian participation in the Holocaust. Given the recent rightward shift of Hungarian politics, this book has a particular resonance in re-examining the social and historical context of the White Terror.
Examining personal data in early modern church registers
Dr Eva Marie Lehner, winner of the Dissertation Award of the Working Group on Historical Women and Gender Studies (AKHFG), dedicated her dissertation to the topic of "Baptism, marriage, death - indexing practices in early modern church registers from southern German parishes". The association promotes historical research on women and gender studies and aims to foster scholarly exchange between all those working in this field. The prize is endowed with 5000 euros. In her dissertation, Lehner examines 16th and 17th century church registers from parishes in southern Germany. The background: clergymen at the time documented all baptisms, marriages and burials of a congregation in church registers. What was new about these ecclesiastical registers was that they included all baptized members of a parish, regardless of their class, gender or other affiliations.
From the statement of the jury: “The work follows on from three important research fields: It contributes to the cultural-historically oriented administrative history as subjects were recorded in the written form. This in turn allowed for data to be generated. It ties in with the history of knowledge since knowledge about people was collected and categorized in church registers. Furthermore, by way of historicizing this knowledge, her work can also make a contribution towards interdisciplinary intersectionality research.”
To the (English) website of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies
The Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS)
“Asymmetrical dependency” - with this new key concept, the Excellence Cluster Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) has opened up a new interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach to slavery and dependency research. While the scholarly discourse has so far been shaped by the notion of slavery on the American continents or in antiquity, the cluster gives it a broader definition: It investigates all forms of profound social dependencies such as slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, and other forms of permanent dependency across epochs, regions and cultures. By expanding the perspectives in terms of content, space and time it opens up dependency research to transcultural comparisons.
