Beata Hock has an interdisciplinary educational and research background. She studied Comparative Literature and Art Theory at Eötvös Lóránd University Budapest. Extending her study of art and cultural history with a focus on gender, Beata completed her doctorate in Comparative Gender Studies at the Central European University, Budapest in 2009. She is currently Research Associate at the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe, contributing to the work of the research cluster "Transnationalisation and cultural identities" with two projects: Inscribing Eastern Europe into a socialist world through art and Art-Artist-Politics: Icons in shifting relationship. Beata lectured at the Central European University, the University of Fine Arts, both in Budapest; and the University of Leipzig. In 2015/16 she is Marie-Louise Motesiczky Visiting Professor at The Courtauld Institute of Art/University of London. Her areas of research and teaching include art history, feminist cultural theory, and the cultural dimensions of the global Cold War.
Beside scholarly articles published in international journals, Beata Hock is the author of the monograph Gendered Creative Options and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema, and the Visual Arts in State-Socialist and Post-Socialist Hungary (Stuttgart, 2013). Beata recently edited Doing culture under state-socialism: Actors, events, and interconnections, a special issue of the journal Comparativ (2014/4). She occasionally works as independent curator; one of her major international exhibition projects was Agents and Provocateurs (on view in Hungary in 2009, in Germany in 2010, co-curated with Franciska Zólyom). She was co-editor of Praesens: Central European Contemporary Art Review between 2003–06 and member of the Editorial Board of ARTmargins: Art – Curating – Media – Politics – Transition (MIT Press) in 2012-14.
"Some of the foundational ideas of the program — interdisciplinarity, a comparative or transnational approach, empirically-based theoretically rigorous research — have remained guiding principles in my academic career after graduation and often proved to be exceptional assets. I remember the Department's multinational faculty and student body as another most challenging and fascinating aspect. In such an environment, the Department's curriculum contested at the same time as it disseminated knowledge produced mainly by Anglo-American academia. Despite the use of one common mediating language, no single national culture or narrative framework came forth as dominant as members of the scholarly community were constantly exposed to many different and sometimes opposing perspectives."
Field of expertise: art and cultural history, feminist cultural theory, the cultural dimensions of the global Cold War
