Dr. Kata Bohus

Professional Background

Dr. Kata Bohus is a senior research advisor at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway and holds a PhD from Central European University. She completed her dissertation, “Jews, Israelites, Zionists. The Hungarian State’s Policies on Jewish Issues in a Comparative Perspective 1956-1968” in 2013. Dr. Bohus also held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Lichtenberg Kolleg, Georg August Universität Göttingen, Germany, from 2014 to 2016 and was cross-appointed as a researcher/curator at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main and at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in Germany from 2016 to 2020. Her research interests center on Jewish history in post-WWII Europe, Jews under communism in Hungary, and Holocaust memory during state socialism.

Dr. Bohus has published numerous books and articles in scholarly journals. Most recently, she co-edited a volume entitled Growing in the Shadow of Antifascism: Holocaust Memory in State-Socialist Eastern Europe (Central European University Press, 2022) with Stephan Stach and Peter Hallmana. She is fluent in Hungarian, English, German, and Norwegian.

Fellowship Research

Dr. Kata Bohus was awarded the Randolph and Elizabeth Braham Fellowship for her research project, “Eyewitness Accounts, Documentation, and Commemorative Practices: A Transnational Study of Raoul Wallenberg’s Memory.” Her project draws on accounts of Hungarian Jewish survivors’ who had first-hand experiences with Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg during his rescue mission in Budapest in 1944-45. Utilizing various mediums such as oral testimonies, memoirs, books of historical documentation, media reports, films, exhibits, and information from and about commemoration activities, Dr. Bohus aims to examine the formation of the memory of Wallenberg as an entangled, transnational process that took place during the Cold War. Her project maps the trajectories of the memory of Wallenberg across different memory landscapes from Hungary to Sweden and globally. Additionally, her project explores how the figure of Wallenberg—mythologized and politicized differently—was included in two political paradigms aiming for global hegemony: antifascism and the human rights movement.

Residency Period: October 1, 2023–January 31, 2024.