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Dr Barnabas Balint is a Visiting Research Fellow from 1 June 2025 to 28 February 2026.
Barnabas Balint completed his doctorate in history at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, researching the wartime generation of Jewish youth in Hungary. Before starting his DPhil, he completed his undergraduate degree in History at the University of Exeter in 2019, where he was awarded the Jean Henderson Prize for the Finalist with Best Academic Performance in European History.
His postdoctoral research seeks to understand the role played by the Hungarian Zionist Association (Magyarországi Cionista Szövetség, MCSz) in resistance and rescue during the Holocaust in Hungary. In so doing, it reconceptualises resistance around pre-existing personal solidarities as opposed to political and national ideologies. Drawing on archives in Europe, Israel, and the United States, this research combines the vast national and transnational networks of Zionist movements with the local realities of the communities where their members lived and worked.
Barnabas’s research will, for the first time, explore the national and transnational history of the MCSz, charting how the organisation developed before, during and after the War. In addition, he will explore how the MCSz and its members intersected with other organisations and individuals, including the International Committee for the Red Cross, international rescuers, the Zionist youth movements, and Christian rescuers. Through analysing the connections between these organisations – which often shared members, funding, and even spaces – his research will show how resistance and rescue in Hungary operated as a human network.
Barnabas has held fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the University of Southern California, the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, and at Yad Vashem under the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Conny Kristel Fellowship.
He has published widely on Holocaust history, with research articles in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, European Review of History, Jewish Culture and History and The Journal of Holocaust Research. In addition to this work, he has co-edited special issues of journals, exploring the intersection between age and gender in twentieth century Europe and the transnational turn in Holocaust studies.
