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.
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”