On November 2, Andor Kelenhegyi defended his PhD dissertation titled „The Beast between Us. The Construction of Identity and Alterity through Animal Symbolism in Late Antique Jewish and Christian Tradition.” He is the 100th in the line of successful Medieval Studies PhD defenses since Stanko Andrić defended his thesis on the miracles of St John Capistran on Friday, 6 February, 1998, as the very first PhD candidate to defend at CEU.
Since then, doctoral dissertations covering a wide range of topics, such as migration and identity during the Lombard invasions, plant depictions in late medieval religious writings, Yezidi oral tradition, urban development in the Galician Rus, widowhood in medieval Lithuania, Ottomans in Hungarian vernacular poetry, woodlands in medieval Hungary, or the animal herding of medieval Cumans, have been defended, reflecting the truly interdisciplinary nature of our department. (A comprehensive list of PhD students and their research topics is available here.)
Many of these pieces of research have since been published as monographs by prestigious publishing houses, such as Dóra Bobory’s work on Count Boldizsár Batthyány (published at Cambridge Scholars), Fabrizio Conti’s work on witchcraft and superstition (at Brepols), or Catherine Keene’s book on Saint Margaret (at Palgrave), just to name a few. (For a more extensive, although not complete list of works published by our alumni, please visit our website.)
With a completion rate of ca. 78%, this PhD program – one of the PhD program available at CEU with a Hungarian, that is, EU accreditation – is a clear success. Our alumni are present in all corners of the academic world, many of them in prestigious positions. (Read about Emilia Jamroziak’s success story here.)
Congratulations, Andor! We are looking forward to the next 100 dissertations!