Biography

Ildikó Barna is a sociologist and Professor at ELTE University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Budapest. She is the co-director of the ELTE Research Center for Computational Social Science. Her research focuses on antisemitism, Jewish life in Hungary and Central-Eastern Europe, memory politics, and post-Holocaust studies. She has led and contributed to numerous international projects on contemporary antisemitism, including large-scale quantitative surveys, online discourse analyses, and studies on Jewish identity. Her recent work combines traditional sociological approaches with computational social science methods, applying natural language processing and automated text analytics to examine antisemitic narratives and Holocaust remembrance in digital environments.

Dr. Barna has been awarded several prestigious fellowships, including the Visiting Research Fellowship at the Malach Centre for Visual History in Prague, the EHRI Research Fellowships at the Arolsen Archives and Wiener Holocaust Library, and the Visiting Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. She has also received the János Bolyai Research Grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

She is the author of numerous publications on antisemitism and Jewish life. Together with her co-authors, she has received the Károly Polányi Prize of the Hungarian Sociological Association three times (2003, 2017, 2023) for the best publication of the year.