Ivan Horvath

He began his career in the Renaissance Research Group of the Institute of Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he was an intern, assistant, senior associate, and then group leader until 1993. In 1980, he earned the degrees of Candidate of Literary Studies and in 1992, Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Meanwhile, he was a lecturer at the departments of old Hungarian literature at the József Attila University of Szeged (JATE), ELTE, and the Janus Pannonius University of Pécs (JPTE).

In 1976, he started building a database called "The Repertoire of Old Hungarian Poetry" (RPHA, Répertoire de la poésie hongroise ancienne), in which he and his colleagues recorded the bibliographic, literary historical and poetic data of all Hungarian poems before 1601, first using a mechanical edge-punched card system and then shortly afterwards using a computer system.
This was the world's first computerized – and since 1993 the first Internet-based – poetry repertoire. This was the first time that information storage and retrieval technology was applied in the Hungarian humanities. Another achievement in this direction was the publication of Attila József's dissertations for the World Wide Web.

At the time of the 1989 regime change, he was one of the founding editors and co-owners of the journal 2000. Later, in 1995, he participated in the launch of the internet journal INteRNeTTo. From 2021, he participated in the editing of the internet publication Hungarian Literary History.

In 1993, he founded the Postgraduate Center for Renaissance Studies (CHER) within the Doctoral School of the Institute of Hungarian Literary History at ELTE. From 1993, he was an associate professor at the Department of Old Hungarian Literary History at ELTE; from 1995, he became a habilitated university professor. In 1997, he received a Széchenyi professorship.

In 1997, under his leadership, a new university program was launched at the Faculty of Humanities (FHL) of ELTE: the "Humanities Informatics Independent Program" (BIÖP).

Between 2000 and 2002, he was a professor at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) and deputy director of the Centre interuniversitaire d'études hongroises in Paris; between 2002 and 2009, he was head of the Department of Old Hungarian Literary History at ELTE.

With his text editions and his 1982 historical-poetic monograph, he gave a new direction to Balassi research. "All the Poems of Bálint Balassi", published in 1998, is the first online text-critical edition in the world; several further critical editions have also been produced in the BIÖP workshop.

The members of the Digital Literature Academy (DIA) decided to award him the title of "Honorary Member of DIA", founded by the Director General of the Petőfi Literary Museum (OIM), in 2023.