Interview with Mate Rigo, Assistant Professor of History at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. The interview was conducted in Florence, Italy on May 14, 2017. To access the audio of the complete interview, click here.
Rigo received his PhD from
Cornell University in 2016. His dissertation, “Imperial Elites after the Fall of Empires: Business
Elites and States in Europe’s East and West, 1867-1928,” won the
Messenger Chalmers dissertation prize. During the academic year 2016-2107, he was in Florence on a postdoc at the European University Institute. In addition to his other scholarly work, Rigo has also written articles and
blog posts on a number of topics, most notably on debates around the Holocaust in Hungary. He has been a long-time collaborator on this blog, so it's about time he was interviewed for it.
Interview Themes
01:00
East-Central European history camouflaged as Hungarian history in Hungarian primary and
high schools?
03:00 Learning Slovak and Romanian in graduate school
04:00
Early retirement of grandparents and great-grandparents as an opportunity to
talk history with them
06:00
World War II, grandparents, Károlyi estate, Transylvania,
grandfather’s degree from Kolozsvár law academy, post-1945 social mobility, “fényes
szelek,” family memory of the “Horthy-regime”
11:00 1990s and interest in the Holocaust as a generational
experience
15:30
The 1990s and the transformation of Hungarian history
21:00
The changing evaluation of the Holocaust in Hungary since the 1990s, growing
interests in Jewish culture and the Holocaust vs. anti-Semitism; revival of
1930s anti-Semitism?
28:00
Interest in financial history, money fluctuation in the 1990s collection of
Roman copper coins gathered in Pécs, Hungary in the 1990s; HVG; pocket money and
currency exchange in the 1990s
30:00 History of Capitalism school at Cornell
31:00
The study of nationalism, the works of Pieter Judson, Tara Zahra, Timothy
Snyder
32:00 Dissertation project, interwar business elites as atypical actors amidst rising
nationalist mobilization, Mózes Farkas, Ferenc Chorin
34:00 CEU as crucial hub for research on East-Central European
history
36:00 Mass mobilization in Budapest for CEU in 2017
37:00 The evolution of the
dissertation as a comparative history project
40:30 Challenges in the archives
43:20 Is there European history as such? Breaking down
divisions between Eastern and Western Europe
46:15 The experience of living in contemporary Italy,
Eastern vs. Southern Europe, traditionalism in Florence; the advantage of
Southern over East-Central Europe
48:00 Experiences of studying history at ELTE
49:45 Studies at Bard College, studio arts
51:00 Literature and studio arts as inspiration
53:00 Max Weber Fellowship at the EUI, History of Capitalism
Reading Group
47:00 Decisive books, Fernand
Braudel’s Material Culture
58:30 Writing the history of Europe
1:01:00 Schools of history, The renaissance of the field of
East-Central European history
1:06:00 Unexplored connections between East-Central European
and Middle Eastern history
1:09:00 Learning languages and
learning from senior colleagues
1:12:00 Yale-NUS College and the popularity of humanities
majors in Singapore
1:14:00 Grandparents teaching “anti-fascist” refugee
children from Greece, 1950s
