Biography
Szinan Radi is a socio-economic historian, working at the intersection of history, economic sociology, and economic anthropology. His research considers the temporality of money, political economy, and everyday economic life in postwar Eastern Europe.
He received his ESRC-funded PhD in History from the University of Nottingham in 2023. Before joining the EUI, Szinan held a Rosztoczy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia (2023), and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2023–4). His research has been published in Europe-Asia Studies (2022) and Contemporary European History (2023), the latter winning the BASEES Postgraduate Best Article Prize in 2024.
Szinan has been working on his book manuscript for Oxford University Press based on his thesis, entitled Contesting Money: The Politics of Time, Value, and the Common Good in Postwar Hungary, 1945–1958. The book argues that money not only mattered in socialist Hungary, but crucially, it was a form of power that shaped ordinary citizens’ subjective perceptions of money’s time value, impacting the political transformation of the postwar state.
At the EUI, Szinan will be researching his second book project, which examines how money shaped socialist Eastern Europe’s economic and cultural connections with the Middle East from the 1960s onwards, influencing Eastern European perceptions of global integration, the fall of communism, and the rise of populist multipolar globalisation in the region.