Anna Menyhért is a Professor of Trauma Studies at the Budapest University of Jewish Studies. She was a Research Fellow at The Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies in Vienna (2020–2021), a visiting professor at the University of Florence (2020), a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam (TRAPRODIG project, 2016–2018), and an EHRI Fellow at London’s King College (2016). She led the Trauma and Gender in Literature and Culture Research Group at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and was the PI of the project ‘Twentieth-Century Women Writers on the Net’ (2012–2015). Previously she was the Vice President of the European Writers’ Council, the President of József Attila Kör, the Literary Union of Young Hungarian Writers, and the Head of the Hungarian Studies Department at the Balassi Insititute in Budapest.
Her research centers around two main themes: trauma studies and women writers. She is the author of five monographs, among them Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Women Writers (Brill, 2020), the impactful Hungarian version was published in 2013 as Női irodalmi hagyomány (Napvilág); and of the bestselling fictional biography of the early 20th century Jewish woman writer Renée Erdős, A Free Woman (Egy szabad nő, 2016). She introduced the perspective of trauma studies in Hungary in the field of literary studies in Saying the Unsayable: Trauma and Literature (2008; Elmondani az elmondhatatlan: Trauma és irodalom).
She has been working on interdisciplinary field development in trauma studies since 2016, aiming at reconnecting cultural and psychological trauma research. She is the co-editor of the book series Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies at De Gruyter; the director of the CEU Summer University Course Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies: Trauma through Contemporary and Historical Perspectives; and the co-chair of the Memory and Trauma Working Group of the Memory Studies Association.
