Public lecture on nation building by Open University

A Hungary-based researcher will give a free online public talk on diverse approaches in nation-building at the Open University of Cyprus this Wednesday.

Dr Zoltán Egeresi, Research Fellow at the National University of Public Service in Hungary is the invited speaker of an online public talk on Diverse approaches in nation-building: theories and practice, which is organised by the postgraduate programme PNYX: Political History, Theory and Practice of the Open University of Cyprus (OUC).

The lecture will be held on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 7pm local time, and it will be broadcasted live via the OUC eLearning tools through the weblink https://tinyurl.com/r2a3sd8r.

The public talk aims at giving an overview about nation-building processes by highlighting the main concepts of nation-building ranging from primordial (nations always existed) to modernist (nations are the products of political maneuvering by elites subsequently they were con­structed mainly as a result of a top-down building process usually in 19th-20th centuries) approaches.

It also proposes a third concept for the emergence of nations, Anthony D. Smith’s approach referred as ‘ethnosymbolist’, arguing that a cultural, ethnic core is needed for the creation of a nation.

The lecture will highlight France and Hungary as main case studies.

Dr Zoltán Egeresi works as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategic and Defense Studies at the National University of Public Science, and at the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade in Budapest. He was awarded his PhD by the Corvinus University in 2019, and his dissertation was about Turkey’s foreign policy in the Balkans.

He also holds an MA in International Studies from the Corvinus University, and a BA in History from the Eötvös Loránd University. His main research fields are Turkey and the Balkans. He teaches various courses, like Nationalism Studies, History of Southeastern Eu­rope and Geopolitics.

Dr Egeresi is visiting OUC for a staff teaching programme in the context of the Erasmus+ Programme during which he will deliver online lectures open to the public.