László Kontler

Affiliated Scholar
Central European University
Email: [email protected]
Website: Personal / faculty page
Biography
László Kontler is professor of history at Central European University (Budapest/Vienna). He has held fellowships and visiting professorships at Rutgers, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Florence, Göttingen and Wolfenbüttel. His research and publications focus on intellectual history, the history of political thought, translation and reception, and the production and circulation of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe, mainly the Enlightenment. His books include Kontler László: A History of Hungary | Atlantisz Könyvkiadó (1999/Palgrave, 2002), Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany, 1760-1795 | SpringerLink (2014) and (with Per Pippin Aspaas) Maximilian Hell (1720–92) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe | Brill (2020). He edited (with Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani and Zsuzsanna Borbála Török) Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View | SpringerLink (2014), (with Mark Somos) Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought | Brill (2017), (with Cesare Cuttica and Clara Maier) Crisis and Renewal in the History of European Political Thought | Brill (2021) and (with István Szijártó and Wim Blockmans) Parliamentarism in Northern and East-Central Europe in the Long Eighteenth Century (2022). László is a founding member and former president of the Europoliticalthought – Website of the European Society for the History of Political Thought, current president of the International Society for Intellectual History Home - ISIH, and co-editor of the series History of European Political and Constitutional Thought (Brill).
Selected publications
- Book · 2025 Parliamentarism in Northern and East-Central Europe in the Long Eighteenth Century: Volume II: Practices of Representation Routledge
- Book · 2021 Crisis and Renewal in the History of European Political Thought Brill
- Book · 2020 Maximilian Hell (1720–92) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe Brill
- Chapter · 2021 Their Own State(s) of Nature: The Enlightenment Social Imaginary and the Invention of Hungarian Ethnic Origins The State of Nature: Histories of an Idea
- Article · 2020 Relocating the “Human Zoo”: Exotic Displays, Metropolitan Identity, and Ethnographic Knowledge in Late Nineteenth-Century Budapest East Central Europe Exotic 'human zoo' displays in late nineteenth-century Budapest, a city without colonies.
Links go to the publisher's page. See all AGPT scholars' work in the Scholars' library.