Budapest University of Economics and Business

Péter Berta is an interdisciplinary social scientist and Senior Research Fellow. He received his PhD from Eötvös Loránd University in 2008 and completed his habilitation in 2024. He has conducted more than 33 months of multi-sited fieldwork among Gabor and Cărhar Roma communities in Transylvania, Romania. His main research interests include the economic, social, and political dimensions of gender inequality, with particular regard to sustainability; the politics of luxury consumption; arranged and forced marriage; and forced divorce. In addition to his position at BUEB, Péter Berta is a Visiting Lecturer/Researcher at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London (https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/19936-peter-berta). He is also an associate researcher with the UCL Transnational Spaces: Migration Research Unit, the UCL Centre for Comparative Studies of Emerging Economies, and the UCL Critical Childhood Studies Centre. His monograph, „Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma” (Toronto–Buffalo–London: University of Toronto Press; https://utppublishing.com/doi/10.3138/9781487520403), received the „2020 Consumers and Consumption Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award”, a biennial book prize presented by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Consumers and Consumption (https://www.peterberta2019.com/asa-interview-2021). The book also received an Honourable Mention from the judging panel of the 2021 Society for Romanian Studies Book Prize. For more than ten years, at the invitation of the European Union, he has served as an expert reviewer and rapporteur in the evaluation of proposals submitted under the following funding schemes: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – Postdoctoral Fellowships; Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – Innovative Training Networks; and Horizon Europe – Widening Participation and Strengthening the European Research Area. Péter Berta is the founder and editor of three international book series: „The Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts” (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), „Gender-based Violence” (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press), and „Gender & Economy” (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). In 2023, Rutgers University Press published „Arranged Marriage: The Politics of Tradition, Resistance, and Change”, an edited volume that he edited (https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/series/politics-of-marriage-and-gender-global-issues-in-local-contexts). Rutgers University Press will also publish his edited volume „Forcing Divorce: Intimate and Non-Intimate Coercive Control in Marriage Dissolution” in the summer of 2027. Péter Berta is currently finalizing another edited volume examining the relationship between marriage payments and domestic violence, provisionally entitled „Capital, Conflict, Coercion: Marriage Payment-Related Domestic Violence”. His English-language articles have appeared in leading international journals, including Research in Economic Anthropology (Q1), Journal of Consumer Culture (Q1), Women’s Studies International Forum (Q1), Social Anthropology (Q1), Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (Q1), Social Sciences (Q1), and Museum Anthropology (Q1).