Róbert Balogh, PhD

Post-doctoral researcher
University of Ostrava, Czech Republic

Visiting Fellowship 2025/26 (August 1, 2026 – August 30, 2026)

I’m a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Ostrava working for the Environmental History group of the REFRESH project that runs in various institutions of Ostrava. My work has centered on the historical interpretation of local and regional manifestations of the Anthropocene epoch. I’m currently rewriting my dissertation into a book with the title ‘An Environmental History of Knowledge and Politics in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Hungary. I am a part of two other research groups. As a team member of the project on the environmental history of Budapest, I am responsible for writing the sections of the collective monograph related to the history of energy production and related infrastructure. To this end, I collect information about the context of decisions that led to the construction of a large municipal coal gas-producing plant just before, as well as of a power plant just after World War I. I am also part of another team that mainly consists of geographers and aims at assessing the resilience and existing alternatives in a large semi-arid region in Central Hungary. In the latter team, I am the only historian, mainly researching the severe drought event of 1863. Both projects mentioned above are financed by the Hungarian Research, Development and Innovation Fund (NKFIH). I completed my PhD dissertation in History at the University of Debrecen in 2022. Prior to my current position, I worked as a researcher at the Institute for the Study of Central Europe at the Ludovika University of Public Service (2019-2024) and a junior researcher at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2014-2017), located in Budapest. I was a research scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi (India) with a scholarship from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations between 2011 and 2013. I have had some teaching experience at the BA level at the University of Debrecen.

Statement of interest

I follow research interests that I see as pillars of the emergence of the new epoch, such as forestry history, the history of animal-human connections, the history of dairy production, and the history of power plants. In terms of geographical scope, I have conducted research in Central Europe and in South Asia. I wish to venture into the environmental history of Central Asia. I am in the process of writing (co-authored) papers about the interaction between pigeon racing, shooting, and society in the second half of the 19th century, about the drought of 1863, and about the history of the sense of environmental crisis.

Selected publications

• Homor, Péter and Balogh, Robert 2024. “Foresters: Linking the Refugee Question and Environmental History in post-1918 State Succession” In Civil Servants under Changing Regimes in Central and Eastern Europe in the First Half of the 20th Century edited by Veronika, Szeghy-Gayer, 131-150. Kosice: Institute of Social Sciences CSPS SAS
• Balogh, Robert 2024. “Green History? What is the Role of Historians’ Work on Environmental Problems of the Past, and What Should it Be?” In Environmental Issues – Community Answers : Environmental Humanities Reader edited by Farkas, Judit, 72-86. Budapest: L’Harmattan Kiado.
• Balogh, Robert 2023. “Milk and Laboratories in Urban-Rural and State-Society Relations: The Case of Hungary from the Beginning of Wartime Shortages until the Great Depression.” Hungarian Historical Review V2 (2023) 1. 118-146.
• Balogh, Robert and Homor, Péter 2023. “Professionalization, State-building and the Language Question in Forestry. The Case of the 19th Century Kingdom of Hungary.” Histórica 14 (2023) 1.23-40.
• Balogh, Robert 2021. “Anthropocene.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies edited by Scott, Romaniuk; Manish and Péter, Marton Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.