MÁRIA SCHMIDT (1953, historian, Hungary) graduated in 1978 as a high school teacher of History and German from the Faculty of Arts of Eötvös Loránd University. She gained her MA in 1985 and completed her PhD in 1999. Between 1996 and 2000 lecturer at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Faculty of Arts, Institute of History; university professor since 2010. As a holder of postgraduate research scholarships and visiting professorships, Dr Schmidt has spent time at the Universities of Vienna and Innsbruck, Oxford, Paris, the Berlin Technische Universität, Tel-Aviv, as well as at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Authority, Jerusalem, the universities at New York and Bloomington, IN and at the Hoover Institute, Stanford, CAL. She was Chief Advisor to the Hungarian Prime Minister between 1998 and 2002. She is Chief Director of the Institute of the Twentieth Century, the Institute of the Twenty-First Century and the House of Terror Museum and since 2002, Trustee of the International Ettersberg Foundation for comparative research of twentieth- century European dictatorships and democratic transformations. Her research interests include the history of the Hungarian Jews after 1918, the history of Hungary under the dictatorships of the twentieth century.