DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Adrienn Kácsor is a scholar of the transnational art, architecture, and visual culture of socialist internationalism in the twentieth century, with a geographic focus spanning from Central and Eastern Europe to Central Asia. She is currently turning her dissertation into a book manuscript, entitled Migrant Aesthetics: Hungarian Artists in the Service of Soviet Internationalism, 1919-1956, which studies the aesthetics and politics of Soviet internationalism from a migrant perspective, critically examining how Hungarian migrants committed to communism participated in the production of Soviet culture while in exile in Europe, Soviet Russia, and Soviet Kirghizia between the 1920s and 1940s, and in Eastern Europe upon their return to their homeland after World War II. In the course of extensive research that sought to map the multifold movements of the Hungarian migrants in what is today Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Austria, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, Kácsor became interested in developing research methodologies that can bring marginalized agents—especially migrant women—to the forefront and excavate histories that have long been silenced or forgotten. Her recent article in the Getty Research Journal, “Tracing Fannina Halle in El Lissitzky’s Letters,” a feminist intervention in the archive of the Soviet avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, exemplifies her interest in unsettling structural invisibilities embedded in and reproduced by archives and art histories. 

In collaboration with Douglas Gabriel, Kácsor has also published on the transnational art of socialist friendship during the Cold War, with a particular focus on artistic and architectural exchanges between Hungary and North Korea in the 1950s. Their collaborative work has been included in the 2022 special issue of Art History, “Red Networks: Post-War Art Exchange,” edited by Vivian Li, and in the 2023 volume Universal – International – Global: Art Historiographies of Socialist Eastern Europe, edited by Beáta Hock, Marina Dmitrieva, and Antje Kempe. 

Kácsor’s research has been generously funded by Barbara Shanley Travel Research Grants (2016 and 2017), the Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR; 2018-2019), a Getty Library Research Grant (2019), The Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC IDRF; 2020-2021), and The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021-2023). Prior to her doctoral studies at Northwestern University, Kácsor studied journalism and history at the Eötvös Loránd University and the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.