István Rév is a professor of history and political science at Central European University in Budapest and director of the Open Society Archives. He was a founding member of the Danube Circle and a past winner of the Right for Livelihood award (the alternative Nobel Prize) of the Swedish Parliament.
Rév was also a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a research fellow at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. In 1995, he was the recipient of the New Europe Prize.
His scholarly interests include historical amnesia, memory, historical anthropology, and documentary traces of the past. His many publications include Retroactive Justice–Prehistory of Post-Communism.