Industry, pollution, material flows, and borders.
East-Central European histories with European and global significance
Industry, pollution, material flows, and borders.
East-Central European histories with European and global significance
About Viktor Pál
Core Research Areas
Transboundary Rivers
Pollution · Measurement · Borders · Environmental diplomacy
How did rivers turn pollution from a domestic discharge into an international political and scientific problem? I examine monitoring, expert cooperation, warning systems, disputed evidence and the institutions created to govern environmental risks across Cold War borders.
Industrial Environments
Factories · Cities · Workers · Technology · Inequality
How did industrial production reorganize relationships among factories, workers, cities, water, air, health and landscapes? I follow environmental burdens from nineteenth-century industrial expansion through state socialism, deindustrialization and contemporary industrial renewal.
Waste and Material Circulation
Environmental Cultures and Mobilities
Environmental Cultures and Mobilities
Scarcity · Reuse · Recycling · Disposal · Circularity
What societies discard reveals how they value and organize materials. I examine scarcity, reuse, consumer packaging, secondary resources, recycling systems and the recurring promises and failures of circular economies.
Environmental Cultures and Mobilities
Environmental Cultures and Mobilities
Environmental Cultures and Mobilities
Tourism · Leisure · Conservation · Landscapes · Environmental ideas
A complementary strand of my work examines how people experienced, used and interpreted environments through tourism, leisure, mobility, conservation, nationalism and everyday practices.
PROJECTS
R²CULT (2026-2029)
Mainstreaming the Radical Right at the Urban Scale: An Investigation of the Discourses and Policies in the European Capitals of Culture (R²CULT)
Role: Researcher, project team member
R²CULT examines how positions and themes of the radical right are increasingly becoming “normalised” in Europe’s urban cultural policy. At the center of the project is a comparative analysis of discourses and strategies in cities participating in the “European Capital of Culture” program where radical right parties enjoy above-average public support.
Funded by the DFG, GACR, FNR
ETRECE (2024-2026)
An Environmental History of Transboundary Rivers in Cold War East-Central Europe
Role: Principal Investigator
This project focuses on the environmental history of transboundary river basins in socialist East-Central Europe. This project centers on transboundary river issues in Czechoslovakia, specifically focusing on the Oder River (shared with Poland) and the Danube (shared with Hungary), and it includes an analysis of both politico-scientific and popular discourses.
Funded by the Czech Science Foundation.
REFRESH (2023-2027)
Revitalizing Post-Industrial Peripheries (2025-2026) COMPLETED
Revitalizing Post-Industrial Peripheries (2025-2026) COMPLETED
Research Excellence For REgion Sustainability and High-tech Industries / Social Lab / Research Programme 3: Historical Risk Analysis of Social Transformations
Role: Lead Researcher / vedoucí výzkumník
This project focuses on the study of the relationship between the evolution of energy resources and technologies and the transformation of social structures.
Funded by the EU and Czech authorities
Revitalizing Post-Industrial Peripheries (2025-2026) COMPLETED
Revitalizing Post-Industrial Peripheries (2025-2026) COMPLETED
Revitalizing Post-Industrial Peripheries (2025-2026) COMPLETED
Revitalizing Post-Industrial Peripheries
Regional Network for Sustainable Urban Regeneration
Role: Co-investigator
This initiative supports community-driven, ecologically sound regeneration strategies rooted in local knowledge, while promoting cross-border.
Funded by Visegrad Fund, Coordinated by PAD Foundation.
Selected Publications
JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY (2025) 90(December), 49-59.
"The history of environmental Turanism in the Pannonian basin in the early twentieth century"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748825001045
JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY (2024) 59(2), 293-312.
"Trouble with the Bottle Beverage Containers and the Widening Waste Crisis in Socialist Hungary"
AGRICULTURAL HISTORY (2024) 98(1): 50–70.
“The Second Hungarian Conquest of the Carpathian Basin. High Modernism and the Ecological Crisis in the Eastern Half of the Habsburg Empire during the Nineteenth Century”
ENVIRONMENT AND HISTORY (2023) 29(2), 239-259.
"Toward Socialist Environmentalism? Scientists and Environmental Change in Modern Hungary"
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY (2022) 27(4), 649-656.
“Illiberal Environmentalism? The Case of Contemporary Hungary”