Res. Assoc. Dr. Ágnes Hesz

Dr Agnes Hesz has an MA in European Ethnology and English Literature and Linguistics from the University of Pécs. She received her PhD from the Interdisciplinary Doctorate School, European Ethnology – Cultural Anthropology Program, University of Pécs in 2009. Since 2006, she has been lecturing at the Department of European Ethnology – Cultural Anthropology, University of Pécs, currently as an associate professor. She was a post doctoral researcher in the ERC project “Vernacular religion on the boundary of Eastern and Western Christianity: continuity, changes and interactions” at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences between 2015–2018, and in the ERC project, the Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe at University College Cork between 2018–2019. Her main fields of research are the various forms of vernacular religion, from death-related beliefs and practices to contemporary discourses on witchcraft and religiosity under communism. She is the author of the book, Élők, holtak és adósságok. A halottak szerepe egy erdélyi faluközösségben (The Dead, the Living, and their Debts. The Role of the Dead in a Village Community; Budapest: L’Harmattan 2012)

She is currently employed as a part-time research fellow in the ERC project DEAGENCY (No. 101095729) at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Faculty of Arts, where she studies the roles of the dead in contemporary rural Hungary.