On 20 March 2026 the Department of Russian Language and Literature at the Institute of Slavonic and Baltic Philology honoured Professor Katalin Kroó, who headed the department for thirteen years, on the occasion of her 65th birthday with an international conference entitled Points of Convergence (Poetics, Semiotics).
The participants of the conference expressed their appreciation for the celebrant’s scholarly work through papers in the fields of Russian literary and cultural studies, comparative literature, as well as literary and cultural semiotics. The wide range of topics presented in Russian and English faithfully reflects the complexity of Katalin Kroó’s research activity, which includes, on the one hand, poetic interpretations of the works of nineteenth‑century Russian classic authors (among them Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov), and, on the other hand, theoretical and interpretive‑methodological investigations in the field of literary and cultural semiotics.
The invited speakers were colleagues who have worked in close cooperation or co‑authorship with the celebrant in the fields of research and teaching over the course of her career.
From the University of Tartu, Peeter Torop, the renowned professor of cultural semiotics discussed Katalin Kroó’s work in literary semiotics in an international context, and Professor Maarja Ojamaa presented, in the form of an online talk, the results of her joint research with Elin Sütiste. Two prominent literary historians from Voronezh State University, Andrey Faustov and Sergey Savinkov, also took part in the event by delivering their papers online.
The invited speakers from Hungary represented in total four universities: Professor Ildikó Regéczi and habilitated associate professor Angelika Molnár brought their greetings from the University of Debrecen in the form of scholarly contributions; Professor Tünde Szabó spoke in her capacity as professor of both the University of Pécs and ELTE; habilitated associate professor Géza Horváth joined from Pázmány Péter Catholic University; Ágnes Péter, professor emerita of the Department of English Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of ELTE; and Péter Hajdu, senior research fellow at the Institute for Literary Studies of the ELTE HTK and distinguished professor at Shenzhen University, joined the event with an online presentation. Among the colleagues of the department, it was the literary scholars who presented their research: habilitated associate professor Mária Gyöngyösi (chair of the organizing committee and head of department), who also delivered a warm congratulatory address to the celebrant, as well as assistant professors Kata Juracsek, Dominika Zoltán (further members of the organizing committee), and Dániel Nagy, who teaches on the international “Semiotics” MA programme.