Péter Bencsik, associate professor, is a lecturer at the Department of Contemporary History, University of Szeged and also in the Doctoral Program in Contemporary and Comparative History. His main research topics include legal and political history of East-Central Europe, especially Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and also the history of state borders, border crossing and travel documents.
He earned an MSc in Geography and an MA in History at the Attila József University in Szeged in 1995, also completing a BA in History of Eastern Europe. He defended his PhD dissertation at the University of Pécs in 2000 and habilitated in 2019.
His research experiences started during his graduate studies in Szeged, in the research group of associate professor Lajos Pándi. As a PhD student, he began to investigate the history of Hungarian travel documents and border crossing during the Dual Monarchy and the Horthy-period. During a postdoctoral fellowship he extended his researches to the post-war period from 1945 to 1989. He started teaching at the University of Szeged, initially at the Department of Contemporary History and later at the Department of Modern and Contemporary Hungarian History. From 2007, in the framework of a grant, he researched the history of the period before the 1956 Revolution. His next research topic was history of Czechoslovakia, especially the 1950s and 1960s and also the history of borders and border crossing.
He regularly presents his papers at various Hungarian and international conferences, publishes Hungarian and foreign language studies. He is author or co-author of ten books, and prepared primary school textbooks and teaching materials used in higher education.
Since 2003, he has been co-editor of the historical journal Aetas in Szeged. He became assistant professor in 2011, and was promoted to associate professor in 2021.