Teaching Fellows

Roy Kimmey is a social and cultural historian of modern Europe who focuses on minority representation, Romani studies, and populism. His research explores continuities in the political ordering and everyday lived experience of difference across major state ruptures in Hungary.

Kimmey’s dissertation, “A Question in History, a History in Question: Romani Politics and Policies in State Socialist Hungary” employs methods of history, ethnography, and linguistic anthropology to investigate why, despite regime change, the question of Romani inclusion and exclusion as posed by Hungarian state actors retains political force into the present. As his dissertation contends, what undergirds this ostensibly minority-oriented question is a Hungarian attempt to define and settle other unresolved social questions, including: labor and migration, population and demography, and even what it means to consume in an orderly way.

His present research project queries the unlikely globalism of would-be anti-globalist illiberal populism in Europe and beyond. More specifically, it examines historical and recent expressions of so-called “anti-gender” movements in order to understand the rhetorical, discursive, and material resource sharing that makes these movements such powerful drivers of populist politics today.

Kimmey’s additional research and teaching interests include ethnomusicology, religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance and media studies, and political economy.