The Democracy in History Workgroup of the CEU Democracy Institute cordially invites you to the book launch of Zsolt Cziganyik, Iva Dimovska (Eds.): Utopia and Democracy.Theories, Practices, Fictions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).

This is a hybrid event. Registration is not required for in-person participants. For the Zoom link, please register here.

About the book:

This book provides a comprehensive review of the relationship between utopia and democracy, challenging the tendency in Western scholarship to assume that an ideal society is inherently democratic. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book covers an extensive range of historical periods and genres, and places emphasis on an understudied issue in the field, namely the role of Eastern and Central Europe in the study of utopianism. The various chapters reflect on the frequently overlooked role utopian thought plays in the development of democratic political structures, despite the fact that the history of classical utopianism demonstrates a multitude of non-democratic patterns. With contributions from political theory, history, cultural and literary studies, the volume explores a range of contexts, demonstrating how utopias offer both a critique and an inspiration for the evolution of democratic societies.

Speakers:

Zsolt Cziganyik is a literary scholar, senior lecturer at ELTE University, the leader of the Democracy in East Central European Utopianism’ research group funded by the Gerda Henkel Fundation between 2022 and 2025. He was born in 1974 in Budapest. He holds an MA from ELTE’s English Department and a BTh from Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Budapest. He began teaching at the English Department of ELTE in 2008, while still a student of the Doctoral School of Literature. Between 2013 and 2020 he worked as a Humanities Initiative Fellow at CEU, and also participated in Erasmus exchange programmes in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the treasurer of the Utopian Studies Society. He lives in Budapest with his wife and four children. His research focus is utopian and dystopian literature and the social and cultural phenomena related to utopianism. He recently completed a monograph investigating the utopian tradition in Hungarian literature.

Iva Dimovska holds a PhD (2021) in Comparative Gender Studies from CEU. From 2022 to 2025, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on the project “Democracy in East Central European Utopianism” based at the DI, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. She is currently an ERA Fellow under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (Horizon Europe) at the Centre for English, Translation, and Anglo-Portuguese Studies, University of Porto, where she is the principal researcher on the project “Utopias in Times of Crisis: Irish Modernist Literature in the 1920s and 1930s.” She was a visiting scholar at the University College Dublin and at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. She has taught courses in modernist literature, feminism and queer theory at CEU and ELTE’s English Department.

Chair:

Tetiana Zemliakova is an intellectual historian of modern disciplinary knowledge and a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the EUI. Her first book project, Building Schools: the American Research University and the Birth of Modern Political Science (1850–1910), is a study dedicated to the intersection between the institutional development of modern research universities and the rise of academic disciplines in Germany and the US. Tetiana’s second project—The Last Men and Their Times: Modernity’s Emancipation from History—explores the history of embodied time in modernity. Following the discoveries of the geological, ontogenetic, and mythical time, the project traces the change in affective schemes of the last men. Tetiana also teaches courses on the history of ideologies and the politics of warfare at the Invisible University for Ukraine, directs IUFU’s Winter Schools, and conducts a writing seminar with IUFU’s graduate students.

The volume is based on the research project Democracy in East Central European utopianism, generously funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and hosted at CEU Democracy Institute.