Kata Dévai is an archaeologist, a historian and a teacher. She is a senior research fellow at HUN-REN–ELTE Research Group for Interdisciplinary Archaeology. She started her research career as a research assistant at the Research Group for Interdisciplinary Archaeology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences-ELTE in 2012. She defended her dissertation with summa cum laude in 2013. She offered a critical review and assessment of the vessel glass from late Roman burials in her PhD dissertation, involving the personal examination of the glass finds in 17 museum collections. The thesis covered a total of 987 objects from 45 sites, making this catalogue of the vessel glass of the late Roman period as complete as possible. Her main research field is Roman provincial archaeology, with a special focus on Roman glass, including also ancient manufacturing techniques, the distinctive traits and secrets of glassmaking workshops, typological and functional analyses, as well as ornamentation and finishing methods of vessel glass. Interdisciplinary research and the archeometry of glass are very important to her. She has been giving lectures and seminars as part of various courses at the Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University from 2007. She has also published more than 60 journal articles and book chapters; her first monograph was published in 2025, and she is the editor of several books. She is a member of the Hungarian Archaeological Association, the Association Internationale pour I’Histoire du Verre, the Association for the History of Glass and the Hungarian Society for Archaeology and Art History. She has been awarded the Postdoctoral Fellowship of MTA Premium Postdoctoral Research Programme (2018–2021), the Bolyai János Research Fellowship (2021–2024), the ÚNKP-Bolyai+ fellowship in 2021, in 2022 and in 2023. In 2024, she was awarded the Kovrig Ilona Prize of the Pro Archaeologica Hungariae Foundation for raising the level of research on Roman glass in Hungary to international standards and for promoting it at numerous international conferences. She is the mother of two children, Adria (2013) and Zamira (2021).
