PhD supervisors 2025-2026

Gender Studies faculty with specific calls for PhD students for 2025-26

The PhD program in Comparative Gender Studies at CEU invites applications that propose dissertation research across the broad and interdisciplinary field of gender studies. Below is a list of faculty who especially welcome new PhD students in specific fields of research to begin in academic year 2025/2026. However, the department's supervisory capacity is not limited to the faculty members below. For the full list of faculty and their profiles, please look here. Also, please note that applicants do not need to secure or decide on a supervisor in advance.

Éva Fodor

I am interested in supervising dissertations with a social science orientation and an interest in how gender and gender inequality shape and are shaped by social and political regimes.   More specifically, my work is in the field of paid and unpaid work, social inequalities, the welfare state, poverty and social reproduction.  Currently, I work on the gig economy, on the transformation of paid and unpaid work after the pandemic and I am exploring new ways of quantitative and qualitative data collection methods.  I can best supervise students who have a firm commitment to producing clearly formulated empirical research, which seeks to connect novel empirical findings to boarder social concepts.   

Andrea Pető

Besides topics of gender history, especially the intersection of memory, politics, and violence, I am interested in supervising dissertations addressing root causes and different forms of global attacks on equality in different historical periods. Applicants are encouraged to address the complex relationship between national, and transnational actors, the impact of digital activism, and how the intellectual legacy of anti-enlightenment movements and key thinkers are appropriated by these dark movements. I am particularly interested in proposals analyzing counter strategies, movements, and activists in the past and today. Topics exploring contested historical legacies and gendered forgetting are also welcome.

Judit Sandor

I am interested in supervising projects in a range of areas involving new developments in the complex relationships between science, law and gender; and the impact of emerging technologies on recent bioethical thinking. I am also familiar with biopolitical studies, and the connections between genes, gender and society. Within the framework of my current ERC Synergy Project,  I am involved in exploring comparative European history of bioethics and public health.

Elissa Helms

I welcome applicants with a background in anthropology or a related discipline who offer outstanding proposals on gender/sexuality and borders or belonging in relation to Europe, whiteness, race/racism, migrant/refugee status, or nationalisms. Research on gender and ethnicized war violence, NGOs, or activism can also be considered. I am especially interested in proposals grounded in ethnographic and discursive methods, including the incorporation of social media into ethnographic worlds. Regionally, I have most to offer students dealing with Bosnia-Herzegovina, former Yugoslavia, Central-Eastern Europe more broadly, or the Balkan Route of migration and the EU border regime. Particularly exciting would be a proposal from someone with the right language and cultural skills to do research among migrants and refugees trying to make it to the EU through the Balkan Route.

Hyaesin Yoon

I welcome PhD research projects in biopolitics, postcolonial critiques, posthumanisms, performance and literary theories, and feminist studies of science, technology, and medicine. I'm particularly interested in supervising research projects that involve postcolonial, geopolitical, or critical racial inquiries. I highly value intellectual curiosity, openness to challenges, and efficient communication skills in my PhD students.

Andrea Krizsan

Andrea Krizsan is open to supervising PhD students with a solid political science or policy studies background and topics related to gender policy change and understanding and explaining the quality of such changes. More specifically thesis projects could address policy change and its link to democratization or democratic erosion, the impact of progressive or retrogressive social movements, impact of international norms and their processes of translation to national contexts. Her expertise is primarily on Europe but she is open to research on other world regions. Methodological focus: primarily qualitative methods or some mixed methods approaches.

Eszter Timár

My research concerns feminist theory, queer theory, affect theory and deconstruction. I am interested in supervising dissertations in the following areas: queer literary studies (particularly from Eastern and Central Europe), especially from the point of view of the political thought of democracy; theoretical projects on queer theory, continental philosophy (especially deconstruction), or psychoanalysis; new materialism/affect theory and deconstruction; poststructuralist feminist theory.