Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth serves as the Leah and Paul Lewis Chair of Holocaust Studies, UT Dallas. She is Director of the Holocaust Studies Program. She has published a number of articles, dealing with aesthetic and ethical issues in French, German, and Hungarian literature as well as with the relationship between art and totalitarian ideology. Since the eighties, she has undertaken several translation projects and worked on various branches of Holocaust Studies.

In the field of translation, she started out with rendering and publishing a significant number of German and Hungarian poems and short stories in such journals as Poetry, Judaism, The Hungarian Quarterly, Partisan Review, The Webster Review, Literary Review, Osiris, Congress Monthly, just to mention a few. But the culmination of her work in this field have been three volumes of poetry (each with Fred Turner), involving the work of some of the greatest poets of Hungary. Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti (Princeton: UP, 1992). This book appeared in Hungary as well, in a bi-lingual edition); Their next book of translation has been The Iron–Blue Vault: Attila József, Selected Poems (New Castle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1999). And Ozsvath and Turner’s third volume of translation is: Light among the Shade: Eight–Hundred–Years of Hungarian Poetry, which has been chosen as one of the most important books of the year of 2015 by Choice magazine, the magazine of the American Library Association.

Besides Ozsváth’s translation projects, she has become involved in Holocaust Studies. Completed in November 1999, In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklós Radnóti, 1909–1944, is a biography of Radnoti and the political circumstances in Hungary during the interwar period. It has been published by Indiana UP, 2000. The translation of this book, under the title Orpheus nyomaban: Radnoti Miklos elete es kora (Akademiai Kiado, 2004), appeared in Hungary as well. Her book, When the Danube Ran Red (Syracuse University Press, 2014), is her memoire. This book is now in the process of translation into Hungarian; and it will appear in 2016 by Corvina Press, one of Hungary’s most prestigious presses (Budapest, Hungary). In addition, presently, Ozsvath has just finished (with Fred Turner) a new book of translations: The Golden Cup: Selected Poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They will start to send it off to publishers within the next few weeks.

Besides translating and writing a number of essays on Radnóti, Ozsváth has published several articles on such writers and poets of the Holocaust as Kosinski, Celan, Nelli Sachs, including several Hungarian Holocaust novelists. Her talk in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Trauma and Distortion: Holocaust Fiction and the Ban on Jewish Memory in Hungary” (2004, March), has been published in a volume Hungary 60 Years After, by Columbia UP 2006. Her talk at Indiana University, “From Country to Country: My Search for Home” (2006, March), was published in the volume The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature, by Indiana UP, 2008. Her article, “Playing during the Siege,” appeared in the Sewanee Review, spring, 2010.

Besides her translations and scholarly writings, Ozsváth is Associate Editor and East European Editor of Common Knowledge, a publication of Duke University Press. Invited speaker at a number of national and international professional conventions, she also is frequently interviewed by newspapers and television stations in this country as well as in Hungary. Furthermore, she consults with and is on the board of such professional, civic, and community organizations as the ZOA, the Educational Committee of the Jewish Federation, The Dallas Memorial Holocaust Center, and The David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.

Learn more about Dr. Ozsváth