CESNUR Appoints Dr. Márk Nemes as Deputy Director
Press Release, June 30, 2025
Professor PierLuigi Zoccatelli (1965–2024) served as Deputy Director of CESNUR for over thirty years. After his sudden death in 2024, CESNUR realized that replacing him with a resident scholar with his experience, skills, and availability to work in the Torino office was impossible. Considering the internationalization of our activities, and the possibility of managing most of our activities from remote, CESNUR’s board voted to appoint a new Deputy Director who will work from abroad. Our librarian, Luca Ciotta, will continue to welcome visitors to the Turin office and the CESNUR library.
Born on March 9, 1995, in Kaposvár, Hungary, our new Deputy Director, Dr. Márk Nemes, is a historian, philosopher, and early-career scholar in religious studies. He received his PhD in philosophy, with a specialization in the theory of religions, at the University of Szeged’s Málnási Bartók György Doctoral School of Philosophy. His research interests involve phenomena of contemporary religiosity, various new religious movements, quasi- and para-religiosity, and other alternative frontiers of lived contemporary religiosities.
Nemes received his bachelor’s degree in history in 2017 from Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, where he later pursued a master’s degree in religious studies, specializing in contemporary religions. Under the supervision of Prof. Balázs Déri, he received his second diploma here in 2019. Later that year, he was accepted at the University of Szeged’s Málnási Bartók György Doctoral School of Philosophy. Here, under the supervision of Prof. András Máté Tóth, he developed a phenomenological approach for studying new and alternative religiosity, based on the work of Scottish scholar of religions, Ninian Smart.
Since 2017, Nemes has actively participated in several national and international academic associations. He was the chair of the Philosophy Department of the Association of Hungarian PhD and DLA Students from 2019 to 2023 and is the editor-in-chief of their publications. He is a member of ISORECEA (International Study of Religion in Eastern and Central Europe Association), SIEF (International Society for Ethnology and Folklore), MAKAT (Hungarian Society for Cultural Anthropology), EuARe (European Academy of Religion), EASR (European Association for the Study of Religions), and ISSR (International Society for Science and Religion). At SIEF, he holds memberships in the Working Group on Ethnology of Religion and the Young Scholars Working Group. Moreover, he is a founding member of the SIEF Working Group on Contemporary Folk Art. At MAKAT, he is a founding member of the Anthropology of Religion Working Group. Since 2025, he has been elected as a Board member in the SIEF Young Scholars Working Group and MAKAT.
He is one of the founders of CESAR (Central European Symposium for the Academic Study of Religion) – a CEE-based network of young religionists, doctoral students, and candidates. He is also the founder and chief organizer of the Interdisciplinary Students’ Conference on Religious Studies, Hungary's only yearly religious studies conference. Between 2020 and 2023, Nemes was a lecturer and thesis consultant at the University of Szeged’s Department of Religious Studies.
In 2023, he was awarded the prestigious Hungarian National Eötvös Scholarship, which enabled him to visit CESNUR (Center for the Studies on New Religions) for a six-month research period. During this term, Nemes finalized his dissertation under the supervision of Professor Zoccatelli, which he successfully defended in early 2025. During his doctoral defense, the reviewers, Prof. István Kamarás and Prof. Carole Cusack, recommended that his dissertation be published in two volumes.
Nemes holds a full-time researcher and research coordinator position at the Hungarian Academy of Arts, Research Institute for Art Theory and Methodology. He studies the common intersections of art theory and religiosity, focusing on artistic aspects of contemporary religiosity, aesthetic transcendence, and the impact of religious art in shaping social reality.
