Zoltán Ginelli

Research Area 2

Stay at EEGA:  April – September 2020

Research project: Postcolonial Hungary: Eastern European Semiperipheral Positioning in Global Colonialism

Zoltán is a critical geographer and historian of science, whose main research is in the geographies of scientific knowledge, the history of geography, and global or transnational history. His research focuses on the historical relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South/Third World in the 19th and 20th centuries, including topics such as colonialism and racism, development and regional planning, geopolitics and foreign policy, the role of experts, and travel writing. He lectured at 6 universities and 2 university colleges, and taught and prepared for Cambridge entrance exams secondary school students at Milestone Institute in Budapest. He is a member of Karl Polanyi Research Centre for Global Social Studies at Corvinus University and the Dialoguing Posts Network. Between 2015 and 2020, he worked as Assistant Researcher in three international research projects based at the University of Exeter: 1989 After 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective, Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections Between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third Worlds’ 1945–1991 and Criminalization of Dictatorial Pasts in Europe and Latin America in Global Perspective. He is also curating the exhibition Transperiphery Movement: Global Eastern Europe and Global South for the 2020 OFF-Biennále Budapest art festival. Based on 9 years of research, he is finishing his book manuscript about the global history of the quantitative revolution in geography. Currently, his EEGA ScienceCampus Fellowship project “Postcolonial Hungary” explores Hungarian semiperipheral colonial history from a global historical, post/decolonialist and world-systemic perspective.

EEGA’s Scientific Advisory Board Member James Mark and Zoltán Ginelli recently talked about „Decolonising the Non-Colonisers. Historicising Eastern Europe in Global Colonialism“. The inspiring discussion is availabe online via YouTube.