Call for Articles

The Hungarian Historical Review welcomes articles, proposals for thematic blocks (3-4 papers), and proposals for entire special issues (5-6 papers) in any topic pertaining to the history of the broadly defined East-Central and Southeastern Europe. Authors of articles are expected to submit their manuscript that consists of 8 to 10 thousand words (including abstract, keywords, notes, and bibliography). Prospective editors of blocks or special issues are expected to submit the titles and abstracts of the papers and a short summary that explains their coherence. All submissions shall be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. More at Submission guidelines.

Call for Journal Articles – 2026/3

The Hungarian Historical Review invites submissions for its third issue in 2026, the theme of which will be

Reproductive Governance from Below:

Childbearing, Trust, and Community Norms in East Central Europe, 1850–1945

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is December 1, 2025.

The deadline for the accepted papers: April 1, 2026.

This Special Issue encourages reconceptualization of fertility as a structuring force, reversing conventional explanations of demographic behavior. Rather than treating reproduction as a passive outcome of ethnicity, religion, or economy, it analyses the decisions made by families and communities, challenging the teleology of demographic transition theory while moving beyond classic family history and historical demography. The Special Issue focuses on East Central Europe, especially the Habsburg Empire and successor states, where similar institutions produced divergent reproductive strategies. This imperial context offers an ideal comparative laboratory, combining shared legal frameworks with varied kinship systems and community norms. The innovative aspect of this approach lies in the reversal of causality: instead of reading fertility as a reaction to external pressures, the Special Issue shows how practices of childbearing reshaped authority, economic strategies, and community cohesion. It foregrounds reproductive governance from below, calling attention to the ways in which midwives, older women, and village judges, for instance, sustained or contested norms. This perspective complements analyses of church and state, stressing interactions between formal and informal authorities. Methodologically, the Special Issue integrates historical anthropology, microhistory, and gender history with demographic tools, network analysis, and GIS. It pioneers the use of underexplored “crisis archives,” such as the documents produced during abortion trials and inheritance disputes, presbytery minutes, folklore, and various ego-documents, which, precisely because they emerge from moments of tension, reveal hidden negotiations of norms.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

the role of trust, reputation, and the influence of informal authorities (midwives, older women, village judges) on reproductive decision-making
the role of informal and formal authorities: comparing community actors with clergy, teachers, and officials across local contexts
the role of community cooperation, female solidarity, and the informal market for abortion through abortion trials
the role of “folk” knowledge about birth control, with particular regard to the roles of doctors, midwives, and older women
the light shed on childbearing practices by conflicts and crises, as evidenced in abortion trials, reconciliation papers, inheritance disputes, and domestic-violence cases
the role of reproductive strategies and abortion decisions in rural Jewish and Roma communities
methodological reflections on analyses of childbearing practices and the sources on which these analyses are based.

We welcome submissions from scholars in various disciplines, including history, the history of science, the history of education, art history, literary history, and cultural studies. We especially encourage submissions that offer interdisciplinary perspectives and engage with current historiographical debates.

Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short biographical note with a selected list of the author’s three most important publications (we do not accept full CVs) no later than December 1, 2025.

Proposals should be submitted to the special editor of the issue by email:

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The editors will ask the authors of selected papers to submit their final articles (max. 10,000 words) no later than April 1, 2026.

The articles will be published open access after a double-blind peer-review process. We provide proofreading for contributors who are not native speakers of English.

All articles must conform to our submission guidelines.

The Hungarian Historical Review is a peer-reviewed international quarterly of the social sciences and humanities, the geographical focus of which is Hungary and East-Central Europe. For additional information, please visit the journal’s website: https://hunghist.org/

Contact:

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Call for Journal Articles – 2026/2

The Hungarian Historical Review invites submissions for its second issue in 2026, the theme of which will be

Travelers, Explorers, Adventurers, Scholars: East-Central European Journeys to the Balkans, Eighteenth–Twentieth Centuries

Deadline for abstracts (max. 500 words): July 15, 2025.

Deadline for full papers (max 10,000 words): November 15, 2025

In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, many East-Central European travelers to the Balkans portrayed their journeys as scientific explorations, producing maps, ethnographic descriptions, and archaeological reports. Yet beneath these scholarly outputs often lay a complex web of motives, ranging from intelligence-gathering and political propaganda to personal ambition and imperial service. Were these figures truly scientists in the field, or were they more adventurers who used scholarship as an alibi?

From Felix Kanitz’s state-funded expeditions and military mapping for Vienna to Lajos Thallóczy’s provocations in Albania and Adolf Strausz’s dual role as ethnographer and political agent, these expeditions often blurred the boundaries between academic work and covert state service. Travelers like Dr. József Székely and František Zach moved seamlessly between research, diplomacy, and revolutionary activity, reflecting how knowledge production and imperial or national agendas were often inseparable.

The Hungarian Historical Review invites contributions investigating these entanglements between scholarship, exploration, and political missions. We welcome papers for our 2026/2 thematic issue that examine scholarly travel(er)s from East-Central Europe in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries whose expeditions to the Balkans (and broader “Near East”) combined academic goals with state interests, whether through unofficial reporting, diplomatic engagement, or covert intelligence work disguised as scientific inquiry.

We particularly encourage submissions that explore:

The intersections and overlaps of science, empire, and national politics in travel narratives.
Case studies of individual explorers who, during their careers, played multiple roles.
The institutional and financial support structures behind these missions.
The afterlives and receptions of their scientific works in political contexts.

Deadline for abstracts (max. 500 words): July 15, 2025.

Deadline for full papers (max 10,000 words): November 15, 2025

Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short biographical note with a selected list of the author’s three most important publications (we do not accept full CVs) no later than July 15, 2025.

Please direct inquiries and submissions to the editor of the thematic issue: Gábor Demeter: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. / This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

More information: www.hunghist.org

The articles will be published open access after a double-blind peer review process. We provide proofreading for contributors who are not native speakers of English.

All articles must conform to our submission guidelines.

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Call for Journal Articles – 2026/1

The Hungarian Historical Review invites submissions for its first issue in 2026, the theme of which will be

Traveling Intellectuals, Transforming Ideas:

Histories of Knowledge Transfer in the Twentieth Century

The deadline for the submission of abstracts: February 14, 2025.

The deadline for the accepted papers: September 1, 2025.

This Special Issue aims to explore the relationships between the transnational mobility of intellectuals and the transformation of ideas by focusing on the various mechanisms of knowledge transfers in the past century. Thanks to increasing access to transborder and transcontinental travel, the movement of intellectuals and ideas from global centers to peripheries, from peripheries to centers, and between peripheries resulted in multiple creative adaptations as knowledge was transplanted from one institutional and epistemic context to another. The special issue explores how these processes were facilitated and highlighted through the opportunities offered by various INGOs affiliated with UNESCO and other organizations with a global reach, such as the World Bank, ILO, FAO, WHO, etc. It also considers how such transfers were influenced by geopolitics, with intellectuals often contributing to—and occasionally challenging—the prevailing hegemonic projects of global powers, especially those of the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945. Drawing in part on the renewed interest in the spatiality of knowledge production and in the importance of biographical focus, the special issue seeks to highlight the histories of such travels and transformations and asks how concepts, methods, systems of thought, intellectual roles, and cultural products were reinterpreted and repurposed in new environments.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

knowledge transfer from East to West, West to East, South to North, North to South
the transnational mobility of scientists, experts, artists, writers, journalists, etc.
the roles of cultural and scholarly mediators and brokers in knowledge transfers
the roles of professional networks and epistemic communities in knowledge transfers
the roles of states, UNESCO, INGOs, and philanthropic organizations in knowledge transfers
relations between secret police or intelligence agencies and transnational travels
how center-periphery and inter-periphery relations impacted transfers
methodological reflections on the analyses of transfers and their various sources

Proposals should be submitted to the special editor of the issue by email:

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The editors will ask the authors of selected papers to submit their final articles (max. 10,000 words) no later than September 1, 2025.

The articles will be published open access after a double-blind peer-review process. We provide proofreading for contributors who are not native speakers of English.

All articles must conform to our submission guidelines.