My main field of research is nineteenth-century Hungarian and Central European art, and I am especially interested in the relationship between visual culture and national identity. My previous research has examined how mid-nineteenth-century Central European painting reflected and shaped ideas about ethnic character, and I have also explored how the same ideas influenced the reception of Romantic theories and imagery in Hungary. My book on the latter subject, ‘Romanticism and Popular Taste in Hungary 1820-1850,’ was published in Hungarian in 2015. My research on Rococo revival in mid-nineteenth-century Hungarian and Austrian painting has been the subject of an essay published in The Art Bulletin in 2014. This topic evolved from my interest in the work of the painter József Borsos, whose retrospective exhibition I co-curated in 2009.
Between 2015 and 2018 I was a Leverhulme-funded Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Working with Professor Matthew Rampley, I participated in a project that examined the role of museums in the promotion of imperial, national and regional identities in Austria-Hungary between c. 1864 and 1918. Within the framework of the project, I examined the principles and practices of collecting and display, the professionalisation of museums, and the relationship between museums and art history as a scholarly discipline.
From September 2018 I am a researcher on Professor Rampley’s new project ‘Continuity and Rupture in Central European Art and Architecture, 1918-1939’, which is funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. I am responsible for a sub-project entitled ‘Contested histories: monuments, memory, and representations of the historical past’, and I will be looking at how artists in the interwar period continued, transformed or rejected the motifs and figures that dominated the historical imagination of nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary.