As President of the Hungarian Studies Association (HSA), it gives me great pleasure to be able to report on the recent activities and initiatives of our organization, though given the immense challenges of the past year and the precarious state of the world as this issue goes to press, I of course wish I were doing so under happier circumstances. The hope I am sure all of us had in early 2022 that we might finally be getting through the worst of the COVID pandemic has since been tempered by the fear and sense of uncertainty we feel over the war in Ukraine. As an association of scholars with deep connections not only to Hungary but also to Central and Eastern Europe more generally, our members have no doubt been glued to their newsfeeds since the Russian invasion began on February 24, with many scrambling to meet the demand for media interviews and public presentations, as well as doing whatever they can to support colleagues affected most directly by the war and to respond to the growing humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and the region.Limited in what we can do directly to help, HSA nevertheless responded to the current crisis by signing on to statements condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and by issuing one of our own on February 25.1 We also published a list of organizations in Hungary working to help Ukrainian refugees and have encouraged our members to continue to send us information that we can share both publicly and within our own networks.2 This kind of advocacy is unfortunately not new to HSA, and over the past few years we have seen a noticeable uptick in the number of requests received to sign on to statements by organizations like the American Historical Association (AHA) or to issue statements of support for our own members and colleagues. In January 2021, for example, we signed a letter of support by the Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington, regarding Péter Krekó, a Budapest-based social psychologist and political scientist who was targeted in the Hungarian press after criticizing the Hungarian government’s handling of COVID vaccinations. Less than a month later, the HSA Executive issued a statement of support for the Institute of Political History in Budapest and sent this also to the AHA and the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). AHA responded by posting a statement of its own on February 22, 2021, and also by writing directly to Hungarian President János Áder.3 In early March 2021 we issued a statement of support for Johanna Mellis, one of our members, who was a target of online harassment as a result of a conflict with a sports media personality. The statement was published on HSA’s social media accounts on March 3.4 As an affiliate association of the AHA, we continue to receive notices of the advocacy work they are doing, and in keeping with our bylaws, the HSA Executive considers invitations to endorse AHA statements on a case-by-case basis.Beyond advocating for our members and supporting causes that we feel are relevant to our mission as a scholarly association, HSA launched a new initiative in 2021 as part of our commitment to promote Hungarian studies and foster dialogue between our members and the broader scholarly community. Looking for ways to engage people during the pandemic, we hosted a series of three virtual book talks in spring and summer 2021. Our first was held on March 18, 2021, and featured Anita Kurimay’s Queer Budapest, 1873–1961 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020). Hadley Z. Renkin served as the discussant. This was followed on May 6 by Ágoston Berecz’s presentation of his book Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland (New York: Berghahn, 2020), with Bálint Varga serving as the discussant. On June 16, Leslie Waters spoke on her book Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderland, 1938–1948 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester, 2020), with discussant Rebekah Klein-Pejšová. For those curious about the latter two of these fine publications, this issue of HSR includes reviews of Berecz’s and Waters’s books (Berecz’s by the discussant Varga). The HSA book series will continue in fall 2022, and we encourage readers of Hungarian Studies Review to attend.The winners of the 2021 HSA book prize were announced at our Annual Business Meeting held in New Orleans at the ASEEES conference in November. Given the number of excellent entries, the prize committee (which was chaired by Katalin Cseh-Varga and included Judith Szapor and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török) decided to select two winners, Béla Bodó for his book The White Terror: Antisemitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919–1921 (New York: Routledge, 2019), and Anita Kurimay for her monograph Queer Budapest: 1873–1961. Of Bodó’s study, the committee wrote that it “is a culmination of the author’s decade-long studies of paramilitary and right-wing movements in Hungary after World War I.” Demonstrating “evidence of exceptionally thorough research and mature historical scholarship,” the book “builds on the recent historical scholarship of transnational European paramilitary violence in the post-World War I period.” Arguing that Bodó offers “not only a crucial contribution” to the historiography “but also a highly nuanced correction to it,” the committee noted that “the author offers case studies of both bottom-up and top-down mechanisms of violence, supported by carefully selected and analyzed archival sources.” The book, the committee members concluded, “consists of a variety of case studies that work well in themselves but are tied together by ego-documents that re-appear in each chapter as points of contact between micro(hi)stories.”5Kurimay’s book, in turn, was praised as “a highly significant contribution to Hungarian and East Central European gender history.” Described by the committee as a “sweeping” study, Kurimay’s monograph focuses on the “political marginalization and stigmatization” of same-sex sexuality in contemporary Hungary. Given its “pressingly timely” theme, the book helps defeat what the author calls “the historical silencing of queer subjects.” Drawing on case studies from different eras, the committee noted that “Kurimay convincingly shows that homosexuality was an integral part of Hungary’s emerging modernity and reminds her readers that Budapest, before 1918, was a multiethnic and multilingual metropole (not necessarily in line with the desired monocultural narrative of current politics).” As the committee highlighted, “Queer Budapest argues that the Hungarian capital, which alongside Berlin was the fastest-growing metropolis of turn-of-the-century Europe, became the site of a remarkably resilient homosexual subculture which outlived all the political changes at least until the early 1940s. A major achievement in its field, the book is bound to inspire more research to come.”6The Prize Committee also selected Leslie Waters’s Borders on the Move as an honorable mention. Based on her doctoral dissertation, Waters’s book was described as a “brave” study, one that provides “a scholarly overview of one of Europe’s most troubled ‘shatter zones’ during the years its inhabitants experienced multiple instances of moving or ‘nomadic’ borders.” Pointing to both its transnational and interdisciplinary approaches, the committee noted that “perhaps the book’s most novel aspect is the account of the Holo- caust told from a multifaceted perspective, paying equal attention to the political and military developments, the resulting policy changes, and the lived experience of those affected by them.”7HSA was also very pleased to sponsor a panel at the 2021 ASEEES conference. Chaired by Szinan Radi (University of Nottingham), the title of the panel was “Central and Southeast Europe toward Russia and East Asia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” Presentations were given by Ádám Farkas (Eötvös Loránd University) on “The Image of Russia in Hungary, 1830–1849,” Mátyás Mérvay (New York University) on “Post-Habsburg Central Europe and Republican China: Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary’s Relations with China, 1918–1949,” Antonina Luszczykiewicz (Jagiellonian University) on “Taiwan in the Polish Media Discourse in the Cold War Era, 1949–1960,” and Bostjan Bertalanic (Josai University) on “Japan and the (Un)making of Yugoslavia.” Johanna Mellis (Ursinus College) served as the discussant. HSA sponsors a panel at each ASEEES conference, and we encourage not only HSA members but all scholars working on Hungary and the region to consider submitting a proposal to us in advance of the ASEEES deadline.8If the first few months of the year are any indication of what might lie on the horizon, 2022 will no doubt continue to present us with challenges that many would have considered unimaginable until very recently. Recent events have shown, however, that the work we do to connect scholars and to help build research capacity and disseminate serious scholarship is as crucial and important now as it ever was. As an association, we will therefore continue to work for our members and hope to welcome new friends and colleagues into our organization.