Canadian studies in Hungary

The history of Canadian studies in Hungary was explained in the recent Canadian Focus of Diplomacy & Trade Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Szeged and the founder of Canadian Studies at that university.

Although, Canadian books were translated into Hungarian as early as the 1920s, the first systematic courses about Canadian literature appeared in university curricula only half a century later thanks to Anna Jakabfi (ELTE, Budapest) who was followed a few years later by Judit Molnár and Péter Szaffkó (University of Debrecen), Árpád Vígh (University of Pécs), who included Québec in the broader framework of francophone cultures and myself.

These early efforts paved the way for other universities and colleges to offer Canada-related courses in various domains, and also for regular academic publications and editions of special issues of literary and academic journals (Nagyvilág, Magyar Mûhely, Helikon).

Our work was greatly supported by the Embassy of Canada with regular book donations to university libraries and by the Association for Canadian Studies in German Speaking Countries (GKS): for about fifteen years, they invited up to ten professors a year for their annual congress where we could create networks including Canadian and German colleagues and later those from the Central European region.

Success story

During the past fifteen years, regional cooperation has been a real success story: several conferences have taken place, the Central European Association for Canadian Studies was established ten years ago, a bilingual (English and French) academic journal was launched. We completed two interesting research projects, one about diasporas from Central Europe who live in Canada composed of scholarly papers and personal interviews in the spirit of 'oral history', and another about the translations of Canadian literary and theoretical works into Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak and Slovenian, offering an online database and a collection of analytical papers about the hardships of translations, the presence of censorship in the case of certain works, the imbalance of translations from English and French, and how Canadian plays appear on stage.

Encouraging students on different levels of their studies (including PhD.) has been a priority for all involved in this field – Judit Nagy (Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church) has reached out to high schools to convince teachers of English that topics related to Canada can make English lessons more colorful.

Our activities are well-received and recognized on the international level with awards for our over-all output or just for a thesis, and two of us were able t participate in the by-invitation-only conference about the Understanding Canada program held in Hamilton in 2012. One can conclude by saying that there is a vibrant community of professors and students focusing on various aspects of Canadian Studies.