Prof. Dr. Máté Rigó

Deutsche Version

Curriculum vitae

Máté Rigó joined LMU in 2023 as a professor of modern Southeast and East-Central European history. He previously taught at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and Brandeis University as an assistant professor. He was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and a fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena. His research is inspired by comparative and transnational approaches to modern European history from the late 19th century to the present.
His first book, Capitalism in Chaos, How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War, explored continuities in social hierarchies despite total war and the subsequent collapse of empires and highlighted antecedents to European economic integration and East-Central Europe’s economic importance.
He is currently working on two research projects dealing with transnational interactions between the Eastern Bloc and the Global South. He welcomes doctoral students working on the global history of Southeast and East-Central Europe (especially with a focus on Romania and Hungary and their relations to Southeast Asia and South America).

Publications

Monograph

• Capitalism in Chaos, How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022)

Selected articles

• “The Economic Consequences of Peace ‘from Below,’ Why Some Austro-Hungarian Minorities Prospered in Successor States after 1918,” The American Historical Review AHR History Lab “A World of Contradictions: Globalization and Deglobalization in Interwar Europe” edited by Tara Zahra and Peter Becker (March 2023): 819-841.
• “Beating Capitalists at their Own Game: Foreign Traders and Foreign Policy in East-Central Europe” The Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (April 2022): 63-81.
• “Imperial Currencies after the Fall of Empires: The Conversion of the German Paper Mark and the Austro-Hungarian Crown at the End of the First World War,” Central European History 53, no. 3 (September 2020): 533–63.
• “Transcending the East-West Divide: Towards a European History of Post-1918 Transitions” [in English] Passato e Presente, Rivista di storia contemporanea 106/2019
• “The Long First World War and the survival of business elites in East-Central Europe: Transylvania’s industrial boom and the enrichment of economic elites” European Review of History, 24/2 (2017): 250-272.
• “Ordinary Women and Men: Superintendents and Jews in the Budapest’s Yellow-star Houses in 1944-45” Urban History, 40/1 (2013): 71-91.