Violetta Zentai is a cultural anthropologist with a PhD from Rutgers University (USA). She was co-director of the Center for Policy Studies at the CEU (2003-2020). She joined the Democracy Institute of the CEU based in Budapest in 2020. She is also faculty member of the Department of Public Policy and visiting faculty at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the CEU. She was one of the faculty members designing and launching public policy MA level teaching at the CEU. She is engaged in research focusing on ethnic and gender inequalities, European equality policies, and debates on post-socialist capitalisms and social exclusion/inclusion. She supervises the coordinating team of the first and second cycles of the Civil Society Monitoring of the Implementation of National Roma Integration Strategies initiative (2017-2020, 2021-2025). She led the CEU team in a comparative research project titled Hate speech, gender, social networks and political parties (GENHA) and contributed to another one titled Anti-discrimination in Public Service (ADinPS). In the recent past, she served as a team leader/lead coordinator of a number of larger comparative European research projects including Employment 2025: How Multiple Transitions Will Affect the European Labor Market (NEUJOBS), Ethnic Differences in Education and Diverging Prospects for Urban Youth in an enlarged Europe (EDUMIGROM), and worked in the core methodology team of the Quality in Gender+ Equality Policies (QUING). She was leading the CEU team in two active Marie Curie international doctoral training networks in topics of critical labor studies and migrant inclusion studies (INTEGRIM, ChangingEmloyment). She is member of the supporting team of CEU's Open Learning Initiative (OLIve) which provides teaching and training services to refugees and vulnerable migrants in Europe. Dr. Zentai has been active in the Hungarian women’s movement; she worked with MONA (Foundation for the Women of Hungary) for many years and she was member of the Expert Forum of the European Gender Institute in its formative period. Parallel to her academic engagement, she worked as expert with the Open Society Foundations for two decades in initiatives related to democratic local governance, equality mainstreaming, and rights based development.
