We are pleased to announce that Zoltan Dujisin has joined the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, Department of History, for a period of two years. He will be supervised by Prof. Dr. Dick Douwes and Prof. Dr. Bregje van Eekelen.
Zoltan is a Portuguese, Hungarian and Chilean citizen and recently obtained his PhD in sociology from Columbia University in New York. Previously, he pursued part of his doctoral studies in Political Science departments at Sorbonne - Paris 1 and Central European University in Budapest. During the past 15 years he has also regularly worked as a journalist, corresponding for the global news agency IPS News and leading Portuguese weekly Expresso from Ukraine, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Zoltan’s research explores how claims to truth are legitimated through expertise, and the consequences of these processes for identity construction. With this concern in mind, his research project “Truth and Expertise in a Changing Europe” unfolds in two timely and contentious topics: 1) Post-communist memory politics and 2) the new information cold war with Russia.
1) In his project Historiographic Expertise in Post-communist Politics Zoltan aims to reveal the deeper political and symbolic significance of the region’s converging memory politics, manifested in relatively successful calls for pan-European recognition of Nazi and Communist crimes as equal. Using field analysis, prosopography and in-depth interviews, he traces this phenomenon back to the rise of state-sponsored memory institutes, hybrid bodies that concentrate a substantial number of memory practices and maintain a difficult and complex relation with the region’s historiography. He concludes that memory institutes are intrinsic to the region’s identity politics and may presage the role of social-scientific expertise in a changing, post-liberal order. This first research axis results in a book and a number of articles.
2) Russia Expertise in the Media Cold War: This long-term research agenda attempts to tackle two timely issues: the decline of traditional media and discussions on post-truth as part of an increasingly visible collision between Russia and the liberal order. Using the rich case-study provided by European media coverage of Russia’s activities in the information sphere, and mobilizing content analysis, in-depth interviews and ethnography, this project examines the production of journalistic identities through their embedding in networks of Russia expertise, and its consequences for how truth and expertise are constructed in the public sphere.
Zoltan is also looking for scholars interested in starting a working group on “Media, Truth and Expertise” at the Erasmus Institute for Public Knowledge. His email is Zoltan.dujisin@eshcc.eur.nl, and his website https://zoltandujisin.wordpress.com/