István Kenesei - Biography#

István Kenesei (born 1947; professor at the University of Szeged and director of the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) studied English and general linguistics at the University of Budapest (ELTE) where he earned his doctorate in 1974. He has been teaching English and theoretical linguistics at the University of Szeged since 1971. He received two degrees from the Academy, the first degree ("candidate of sciences") in 1980, the second one ("doctor of sciences") in 1992, which qualified him to become full professor in 1993. He was visiting professor in Newark (DE, USA), Cambridge, Venice, Bilbao, Durham, Paris and Utrecht and Fulbright fellow in Washington, D.C. He was appointed director of the Research Institute for Linguistics in 2002 while keeping his professorship at the University of Szeged. He retired in 2017 and continues to serve as professor emeritus at both U Szeged and RIL HAS.

István Kenesei has been the principal investigator of the following research projects: (i) Comprehensive Grammar Resources - Hungarian (current), and formerly of (ii) reference database for social sciences and humanities, (iii) Dutch-Hungarian Research Project on the Left Periphery, (iv) Development of Graduate Level Teaching. He is the editor of four important series: (i) Approaches to Hungarian, publishing theoretical linguistics papers on Hungarian, (ii) LingDoc, which is a yearbook of refereed articles by PhD students in Linguistics and (iii) Studies in General Linguistics (in Hungarian), publishing thematic volumes on selected topics in theoretical linguistics, and (iv) Comprehensive Grammar Resources (with Henk van Riemsdijk and Hans Broekhuis).