About us
October 22, 2006 by Friday Circle
Contact us
Send all enquiries, comments etc. to hungarian.studies[at]googlemail.com
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Like the Sunday Circle, our informal meetings feature some of the most prominent minds of the day discussing anything and everything of interest, except we meet on Fridays. We meet at 5pm in the Jacques wine bar/cafe of the Tavistock Hotel, Tavistock Square, London WC1H (map). Everyone is welcome to attend, and please check this site in advance for details of weekly activities.
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Who we are …
Daniel Abondolo is Senior Lecturer in Hungarian Studies at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL-SSEES). His research interests include Hungarian and comparative metrics, translation, the evolution of literary norms, the description and reconstruction of Uralic languages and the isolates of Eurasia.
Gwen Jones holds a doctorate on the prose fiction of Budapest, 1873-1939, and taught Hungarian literature at BA level in 2005/6 at UCL-SSEES. Her research interests include Hungarian literature from the 19th century to the present, and representations of the city in literature. She is presently working on a number of translations, and maintains this site.
Peter Sherwood, Laszlo Birinyi, Sr., Distinguished Professor in Hungarian Language and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, formerly Hon. Senior Lecturer in Hungarian Language and Literature and (College) Teacher in Hungarian at UCL-SSEES. London. Peter has also lectured in Ob-Ugrian Studies and General Linguistics, and taught in Budapest, Debrecen, Szeged and Rome.
Eszter Tarsoly is Teaching Fellow in Hungarian Language, and a research student at UCL-SSEES. Her doctoral thesis will explore questions of language planning, linguistic purism, and ideologies of language with special regard to Hungary and the circum-Pannonian region.
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About our banner: the image you see at the top of the page is a section of Anna Lesznai’s (1885-1966) ‘Ady párna’, or Ady-cushion, an embroidery from 1912.
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The Sunday Circle (Vasárnapi kör - article in Hungarian) was a group of young philosophers, musicians and artists whose weekly meetings provided a forum to discuss questions of ethics and aesthetics, from 1915 to 1919. The group centred on Georg Lukács, and also included Károly (Karl) Mannheim, Béla Balázs, Leo Popper and Anna Lesznai.
A number of Sunday Circle members wrote of their involvement: Béla Balázs in Unmögliche Menschen (Impossible People, 1930), later published in Hungarian as Lehetetlen emberek (Impossible People, 1965); Emma Ritoók in A szellem kalandorai (Adventurers of the Spirit, 1921). The standard monograph on the Circle is edited by Éva Karádi and Erzsébet Vezér, A vasárnapi kör, Budapest, Gondolat, 1980.
An early twentieth century kávéház, coffee house, the Centrál:
