Dr Valeria Fulop-Pochon

Valéria Fulop-Pochon completed her PhD in History of Art in 2026. Valéria’s doctoral thesis investigates the art productions of Hungarian modernist women artists between c.1930 and c.1960, in the context of Hungary's geopolitical transition to the Soviet sphere. Valeria's dissertation explores women artists working in exile, emigration and state-support.

Valéria has research interests in:

- Transnational modernisms, modernist women artists, twentieth-century art and design in Europe and beyond its borders 

- Representations of trauma, identity, gender and sexuality

- Cold-War visual cultures

- women artists in exile and emigration

- women artists and state-support

- Socialist Realisms

- Intersections of folk-art, indigenous art, applied art and fine art

- Socialist women's movements and peace-activist art and craftivism

 - Hungarian visual arts and cultures

- Ceramic art and painting

PhD completed at the Department of History of Art (Historical Studies)

Graduate Teacher, Level 2 (History of Art and Liberal Arts)

Supervisor for individual research projects on the Arts and Social Sceinces Foundation Year programme (Faculty of Arts)

Teaching experience:
History of Art:

Seminar tutor for the Time and the Image and Episodes in Global Visual Culture 2 modules.

Unit leader for Making and Materiality: Painting.

Liberal Arts: Seminar tutor for the Experiencing the Aesthetic unit.

English: Supervising individual research projects on the Individual Project unit, Foundation in Arts and Social Sciences (CertHE)

Thesis Title: 
Modernist Hungarian Women Artists c.1930-1960

My dissertation examines modernist Hungarian women artists during the period of c.1930-1960, investigating gendered artistic experiences in the context of Hungary’s political and cultural transition from far-right rule and Fascism (c. 1920-1945) to Stalinism and Communism (c. 1948-1989). The arguments are constructed via Hungarian women artists from the period under investigation: the sculptor-ceramicist Margit Kovács (1902-77), exploring the trajectory of the state-supported/popular artist; and two painters, Margit Anna (1913-91) as the blacklisted/inner émigré and Judit Reigl (1923-2020), as the dissident/émigré artist. This dissertation argues that major historical events taking place in Hungary between the 1930s and 1960s, including the persecution of Jews (from the 1930s) and the Holocaust (1944-45), the Second World War (1939-45), the following Soviet occupation and Stalinism (1945-56), the onset of the Cold War and the various Hungarian communist regimes’ cultural policies introduced in the 1950s and 1960s significantly impacted the development of Hungarian women’s art within the national and international art scenes.
This thesis challenges art historical hierarchies that establish the opposition between ‘official’ Socialist Realism and ‘unofficial’ counterculture abstract art within the cultural Cold War, often disregarding women artists whose work cannot be unequivocally classified within these terms. I argue that, beyond the binaries of fixed, politicised categories, women’s art in Hungary existed, and Hungarian women produced a heterogeneous body of work between the 1930s and 1960s, addressing a diverse and varied set of issues and concerns, including gender, identity, and sexuality.