American concepts in interwar Hungarian geography

American concepts in service of territorial revision in interwar Hungarian geography: Knowledge flows inside the global academic semiperiphery
The lecture will focus on the case of Hungary after World War I and especially the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. The international “journey” of cartographic and statistical methods U.S. geographers introduced in the 1910s and 1920s to measure the “cultural level” of various nations and Hungarian geographers adopted to justify Hungarian elites’ territorial claims and revisionary attempts will be presented. Employing this story as a case study, the aim is to illuminate the mobility of scientific concepts between what were both semi-peripheral countries in the global power geometries of science, the academic and political interests behind this mobility, and the role the different geopolitical motivations and scholarly traditions in both countries played in the significant adjustment of the original concepts during their mobility.