Prof. Balázs Trencsényi is Professor of History, specializing in the field of East and Central European political and cultural thought.
He is currently Director of IAS Central European University, Budapest (since 2023) where he previously served as Head of the History Department. He is also Director of the History in the Public Sphere Erasmus Mundus MA programme at the CEU (since 2020), Co-Director of Pasts Inc. at the Center for Historical Studies (since 2006), and co-organises the Invisible University for Ukraine project.
He has been closely related to CAS Sofia for the last ten years. He is a founding member of the research group on Regional Identity Discourses in Central and Southeast Europe (1775-1945), supported by the Prince Bernhard Foundation (the Netherlands), and hosted by CAS Sofia (2001-2004). He has been awarded a CAS Associate Fellowship the under the NEXUS Project for his research on “The Conceptualization of Collective Identity and the National Character-Discourses in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary in the Interwar Period.”
In the period of 2004-2005, he was Project Fellow at CAS, studying the Romanian debate on the national character in the nineteenth century. Dr. Trencsényi is a recipient of the European Research Council Starting Independent Researcher Grant as Principal Investigator of the project, “Negotiating Modernity: History of Modern Political Thought in East-Central Europe,” over a period of five years, hosted by CAS Sofia in cooperation with CEU. Jointly with Prof. Diana Mishkova, he is convener of the project “European Regions and Boundaries. A Conceptual History ” (2012-2013), hosted by CAS Sofia.