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Gender and Modernity in Central Europe - Agatha Schwartz's new publication

October 19th 2010

Kevin Burns

Gender and Modernity in Central Europe: The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and its Legacy, published this year by the University of Ottawa Press, is a collection of essays edited by University of Ottawa professor Agatha Schwartz. In 2008, she, together with Judith Szapor from McGill University, organized an academic conference with the same title that brought together specialists from different areas of study and from universities in Europe, North America, India and Israel. Schwartz was confident that as these scholars shared their insights clear links would emerge between fin-de-siècle Central Europe and contemporary Canada. “There are actually some important lessons that we can learn from Central European Studies that we can also apply in Canada,” she explains. Read more...

Heroes Don’t Cry, Judit Kopacsi-Gelberger’s new book

October 18th 2010

Kevin Burns

Some books write themselves while others require a little more intervention. In 1992, Judith Kopácsi-Gelberger published a short book about her Hungarian childhood in which she captured the details of her tumultuous family life. Her father was Sándor Kopácsi, the Police Chief of Budapest in the years running up to and including the Revolution. “I strictly focused on my experiences as a child,” says the author who “wrote it as it happened and how I lived it.”

In that turbulent and violent period Kopácsi-Gelberger’s father took a decision that put his life at risk. He refused to intervene when a group of university students started demonstrating in the streets. As Police Chief he was expected to intervene, and to do so harshly. But the students were unarmed. His decision not to shoot into a defenceless crowd resulted in his arrest by the Soviet army and his threatened execution. “It was a great emotional challenge to portray those events, as they were still too raw in my heart and my mind,” says Kopácsi-Gelberger. Read more...

Edna Stabler Award for new non-fiction work on Hungarian immigrant

October 18th 2010

Author John Leigh Walters of Kitchener, Ontario, has been awarded the 2010 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction for his debut work, A Very Capable Life: The Autobiography of Zarah Petri (Athabasca University Press). The book is about Walters’ mother, a Hungarian immigrant to Canada. Administered by Wilfrid Laurier University, the $10,000 award recognizes Canadian writers of a first or second work of creative non-fiction that includes a Canadian locale and/or significance. The award will be handed out during a reception at Wilfrid Laurier University on Nov. 10.

For more information about the author and the book , see the CBC arts website.

Family history: Lee Ann Smith’s new book

October 12th 2010

Lee Ann Eckhardt Smith is an award-winning writer of short fiction, as well as non-fiction books and articles. She presents the story of four generations of her mother’s family in Strength Within: The Granger Chronicles. The Gerencsér family arrived in North America in 1905 from Kispécz, Hungary, answering the siren call of “American fever.” Thirty years later, the anglicized Grangers fled depression-torn Buffalo, New York for St. Catharines, Ontario. Read more...

Hungarian Scholar Visits British Columbia

August 24th 2010

John Miska

Dr. Gertrud Szamosi, professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Pécs, visited British Columbia in early August 2010 to study the work of Hungarian-Canadian novelists writing in English in the province. Dr. Szamosi informed us that she is planning to extend her interests to include Hungarian-Canadian memoirs and further sources of Hungarian-Canadian literature in both English and French, in addition to the fields of English Literature and Culture, Post-colonial and Post-modern fiction, and, more recently, Canadian Studies, which she has explored during her distinguished career. Read more...

Professor Marlene Kadar's latest book

Prof's new book re-examines the forces at play in interpreting photographs

From YFile, York University's daily faculty online news archive for January 12th 2010: http://www.yorku.ca/yfile/archive/index.asp?Article=13976

A picture may tell a thousand words, but what if the image is distorted or the meaning misconstrued? The newly published Photographs, Histories, and Meanings, co-edited by York Professor Marlene Kadar, re-examines photographs and their social history, exploring the ideological, ethical, political and esthetic forces that influence their interpretation. Read more...

Anna Porter on Eastern Europe at St Thomas’s Church, Toronto February 10th 2010

On February 10th 2010 at 8 pm Anna Porter is giving this year’s Gene Stewart Lecture (“Repairing the World”) at St Thomas’s Anglican Church in Toronto. She is talking about Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin wall. The previous two lecturers have been General Romeo Dallaire and Dr Roberta Bondar. Anna’s new book tentatively titled “The Ghosts of Europe” will be published later this year.

For more information view the poster.

February 3rd 2010

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