History of Hungarian Studies at Indiana University :: History
The origins of the Hungarian Studies Program at Indiana University go back to the time of the Second World War. Before World War II no post-secondary educational institution in the United States offered Hungarian language, history, culture or civilization. Soon after the war started the Washington administration realized that the country was lacking experts in foreign areas and languages of the world. To solve this problem an Army Specialized Training Program was created in 1942. On different university campuses the program provided intensive training in dozens of languages. Indiana University, Bloomington was selected as a center for teaching several Eurasian languages including Russian, Turkish, Finnish and Hungarian. The young Hungarian linguist Thomas A. Sebeok was appointed in charge of the Hungarian and Finnish groups. Eventually, he was made responsible for the entire operation. The teaching of Hungarian at IU continued after the War, and due to the activity of Professor Sebeok, who was backed by the internationally minded President of the University, Herman B. Wells, a variety of area studies and language programs took root. One such undertaking was the Program in Uralic and Altaic Studies, including Finno-Ugric languages and linguistics. By the mid-1950s Professor Sebeok’s attention turned to other fields of study, and Uralic and Altaic Studies became the duty of his colleagues. Hungarian language and linguistic studies continued under the guidance of Professor Alo Raun, an Estonian exile who had studied in the Eötvös College at Budapest in the early 1930s and was a brilliant speaker of Hungarian.
The arrival of Professor Denis Sinor from Cambridge University in the academic year of 1962-63 brought about a new upturn for the Hungarian Studies Program. On his initiative, in 1965 the Program in Uralic and Altaic Studies was recognized as a graduate department with a full range of privileges. Professor Sinor was appointed the first Chairman of the Department and he held this position up to 1981. Under his guidance the Hungarian Studies Program became a foundation stone of the curriculum in the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies. In 1993, the Department was renamed the Department of Central Eurasian Studies. Besides the teaching of language, the program consisted of various history and literary courses. The history courses were taught by Professor Sinor himself, while teaching literature belonged to the duties of Professor Gustav Bayerle who joined the Department in 1966. Although Professor Bayerle’s professional fields were Ottoman Turkish and Ottoman History, his involvement in the Hungarian Program was quite natural since he was not only a native Hungarian, but he had studied Hungarian history and literature at Budapest University as well, before leaving the country in 1956. Besides Professor Bayerle, Professor Gyula Décsy, who joined the Department in 1978, contributed to the curriculum of the Hungarian Studies Program with a focus on Hungarian linguistics, mainly the history of the language.
Although the relations between the U.S.A. and Hungary were far from friendly at that time, another innovation of Professor Sinor was that beginning in 1968 the Department regularly employed Hungarian language teachers coming for that purpose from Hungary. Since that time Hungarian language has been taught on three levels in Bloomington: introductory, intermediate and advanced.
The Hungarian Studies Program reached a new level in 1979 when an agreement was signed by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Indiana University on the establishment of a Hungarian Chair. It was agreed that the Chair was to function within the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies and that the holder would have full professional rank. In 1980, to create and sustain the Chair, the Hungarian Academy transferred to Indiana University Foundation a sum of 250,000 USD for the basic endowment. This action was, and remains, unparalleled in the relationship between the USA and any socialist country. As for the University, it undertook to contribute to the operating budget of the Chair an annual amount not less then the earnings of the endowment for the same period. In fact, ever since that time the University overfulfilled its obligation. The agreement also specified that the Hungarian Academy of Sciences would continously contribute to enrich the library of the Chair. The appointment to the Chair was assigned to a special search committee consisting of members from both the Hungarian Academy and Indiana University.
The first holder of the Chair, Professor György Ránki, Deputy Director of the Institute of History and Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, began his work in the Spring Semester of 1981. Up to 1986 Professor Ránki spent both semesters on the campus. From 1986, however, when he was appointed Director of the Institute of History, until his unexpected death on February 19, 1988 Ránki was able to be in Bloomington only one semester in every year. In his absence Professor Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (1986), Professor Kálman Kulcsár (1987) and Professor Tamas Bácskai (1988) taught courses. Professor Ránki (like Professor Sinor before him) divided Hungarian history into three chronological parts: up to 1526, from 1526 to 1918, and from 1918 up to the present. He also offered different more specialized seminars on modern Hungarian history, culture and civilization.
One of the main goals of Professor Ránki was to make Bloomington an internationally recognized conference center on Hungarian topics. During his tenure he organized several forums and symposiums, at least one yearly, but sometimes more, always with a clearly focused topic (for a full list of conferences follow this link). The proceedings of the first two conferences were published in a short-lived series launched by Professor Ránki, the Indiana University Studies on Hungary.
After Professor Ránki’s death in February 1988, the Chair was named for him and became known as the György Ránki Hungarian Chair. In the summer of 1988 Professor Mihály Szegedy-Maszák from ELTE became Chair; he stayed in Bloomington for three academic years. During his tenure the offerings of the Hungarian Studies Program underwent some modifications. As a distinguished literary scholar he placed more emphasis on literature and culture. He introduced new courses such as Hungarian Literature to 1900, Modern Hungarian Literature, Hungary between 1890 and 1945, Hungary from 1945 to the Present. The traditional duty of the Program, teaching Hungarian history, was shared between himself and Professor Bayerle who rejoined the Hungarian Program by offering in every second year a history course entitled Hungarian History and Civilization to 1711. In the 1990s Professor Jeffrey Harlig has also taught Hungarian linguistics courses.
Professor Szegedy-Maszák continued the traditional outreach activity of the Chair. He was able to obtain significant subsidies for the Program which made possible the organization of new conferences such as National Identity and Culture: Hungarians in North America (1990) and The Life and Times of Ernő Dohnányi (1991). Many of the presentations of the symposia were published in Hungarian Studies, a periodical of the International Association of Hungarian Studies, of which Professor Szegedy-Maszák has been editor since 1985, and editor-in-chief since 1988. In 1991 Professor Szegedy-Maszák became a tenured full professor at Indiana University. The Chair's budget no longer had to provide his salary, and thus a new period began in the history of the Hungarian Chair. Unlike the previous practice a one-year rotation became the norm. Most of the Chair's holders were historians, with the exception of a psychologist and a folklorist (for a full list of Hungarian Chairs click here). In addition to the basic courses they offered several more specialized seminars on different Hungarian or East European topics in accordance with their interest and specialization. The Hungarian Studies Program remains the only program in North America to offer both MA and PhD in Hungarian Studies, and is a valuable part of the special language and area studies programs Indiana University has to offer.
