Tamás Scheibner

Tamás Scheibner is a historian and literary scholar specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of Central and Eastern Europe. He is Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy for 2026–2027, Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities.

His research explores how literature and ideas move across linguistic and political borders, and how these exchanges shape cultural and intellectual life. Bringing together cultural and intellectual history, comparative literature, and translation studies, he examines the institutions and networks through which texts circulate and acquire authority. His work on socialist realism, censorship, and Cold War cultural diplomacy investigates how political projects shaped literary production and international exchange. His studies of cultural opposition, public memory, and conspiracy theories consider how competing interpretations of the past become resources for political action.

His research on migration and exile extends these questions to the movement of people, tracing the role of émigré communities and international organizations in cultural exchange and humanitarian cooperation. Current projects explore the history of comparative literature during the Cold War, cultural internationalism from the League of Nations to UNESCO, and the global consequences of the 1956 Hungarian refugee crisis. Digital humanities connects these areas of inquiry through his work on historical databases, translation resources, and digital collections, which support the study of personal and institutional networks and the preservation of cultural heritage.

He held a Fulbright Fellowship at Stanford University’s Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. He has also held fellowships and visiting appointments at the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, Babeș-Bolyai University, Indiana University Bloomington, the University of California, Irvine, Aarhus University, and the University of Vienna. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from ELTE and served on the Executive Board of the European research project COURAGE, which investigated the cultural heritage of dissent under state socialism.