Viktor Karády

Viktor Karády was born in Budapest, Hungary. After graduating from high school, he entered Eötvös Loránd University, where he majored in English-Hungarian language and literature. In 1956, he left the country, and studied English, German, and theater history at the University of Vienna in 1957-1958. From 1959 to 1965, he studied sociology, English, and demography at the Sorbonne in Paris. He worked for three years as an assistant to Raymond Aron at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS, National Center for Scientific Research). At the same time, he taught sociology at the Sorbonne. From 1978, he also worked at the Centre de sociologie européenne (European Center for Sociology), directed by Pierre Bourdieu. Between 1979 and 1986, he was a lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, and from 1980 to 1982 at Oxford University. In 1983, he was appointed director of research at the CNRS, a position he held until his retirement in 2003. Prof. Karády's research areas include the 19th and 20th centuries, the social history of Hungarian Jewry and the exploration of its identity models, and the scientific historical analysis of the 20th century French school of sociology. Since 1992, he has been a professor in the history department of the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author or co-author of numerous books and scholarly articles, and was a member of the editorial board of the Revue française de sociologie from 1971 to 1985. In 2002, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic and in 2007, he received the Károly Polányi Award of the Hungarian Sociological Society. He is married to Veronika Görög-Karády, an ethnographer and folklorist.