SLI2016: Own fate - Self-managing the Future
Viktoria Ferenc, PhD, received a Sylff fellowship in 2011–12 at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She works as a linguist, dealing with linguistic minorities.
Currently I work as researcher at the Research Institute for Hungarian Communities Abroad, Budapest, Hungary. My research activity focuses on language policy in multilingual context and the maintenance of minority languages, language rights of minorities, with special attention to the Hungarian minorities abroad. As a SYLFF fellow in 2011 – under the supervision of the great Hungarian linguist, Miklós Kontra, professor of the University of Szeged – I carried out one of my first empirical researches on the Hungarian minority higher education in Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. This work finally served as a fundamental part of my doctoral dissertation, which I defended in 2014 at the Doctoral School of Linguistics, Applied linguistics PhD Program, University of Pécs, Hungary, under the academic supervision of István Csernicskó. Since I received my PhD (2014), I have had the honor to coordinate several research projects in my field. Based on the research data that I gathered, multiple journal articles and book chapters were published in the past years. I had the chance to participate in national and international conferences regularly. Recently I presented at the annual World Convention of the Association of the Study of Nationalism in New York. In 2016 the Hungarian National Cultural Fund supported my project of writing the manuscript of my first monograph (Universities and Languages) based on my doctoral dissertation. In 2014 I was awarded with external membership in the Public Body of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
My identity and skills as a researcher have developed a lot during the SYLFF Scholarship and other supported research projects in Hungary and abroad: besides my Hungarian experience, I spent longer periods of time in Finland, Slovakia, Estonia, and Argentina.
Besides my research activity I work as a member of the editorial board of the Hungarian Journal of Minority Studies and the Hungarian journal ‘Kisebbségi Szemle’. I work as a supervisor of PhD students’ research activities within the frame of the Balassi Instituite’s Researchers’ Program at Budapest. Between 2011 and 2013 I was the president of the association of Hungarian doctoral students in Ukraine called “Momentum Doctorandus”, and from 2013 to 2017 I was the vice-president of the Postgraduates’ International Network. From 2015 I help the work of the Hungarian SYLFF Fellows’ Association as an activist.
