Csaba Szilágyi

With the Archivum since 1996, Csaba manages the professional archival activities and is responsible for the human rights collections and pertinent education and public programs. He is one of the teaching fellows of the Archives, Evidence and Human Rights course and Archives and Evidentiary Practices Specialization at CEU. Intermittently, he worked as an archival consultant for the Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch (1999–2000) and was the first curator of the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research at Columbia University (2005–2006) in New York. He also served as a pro bono archival consultant for the Srebrenica Memorial Center and assisted in designing and establishing a research archive there (2019-2022).

He is interested in how technological advancement informs the collection, archiving, and dissemination of human rights records; the representation and memorialization of mass atrocities in the archival space; and the role of documentation in the global refugee experience. As a researcher, he focuses, from a human rights and social in/justice perspective, on the roles, responsibilities, and limitations of archives in managing the heritage of, creating knowledge on, and transforming memory politics relating to mass atrocities of the recent wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Csaba studied Hungarian literature and holds an MA in American Studies (Lajos Kossuth University, Debrecen), and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Outside the archival world, Csaba translates fiction and historical and political writings.