Imre Zsolt Lengyel

Imre Zsolt Lengyel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Hungarian Literary History at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Faculty of Humanities. His work focuses on early-twentieth-century Hungarian prose, the sociology of literature, and the political economy of literary life.

Education:

• 2004 – Secondary-school leaving exam, József Attila High School, Makó
• 2009 – BA in Aesthetics & Hungarian Language and Literature, ELTE
• 2009-2012 – PhD scholarship, ELTE Doctoral School of Literary Studies
• 2016 – PhD (literary studies), dissertation on the invention of the “folk-writer” figure

Research interests: Lengyel explores how literary canons are formed, how periodicals shape national culture, and how writers position themselves within the social field. He combines close reading with sociological and book-history approaches, frequently publishing on authors such as József Erdélyi, Zsigmond Móricz and Sándor Tar.

Grants & awards: He has held a Republican Scholarship, the competitive Móricz Zsigmond Scholarship, the Béla Bodor Award for young researchers, and since 2022 the prestigious Bolyai János Research Scholarship supporting a project on literary capitalism and nationalism.

Advising & teams: While no supervised students are listed, he is an active participant in national doctoral conferences and serves as invited lecturer at ELTE’s Doctoral School of Literary Studies.