Mária Bartal is a literary historian and literary translator, and a habilitated associate professor at the Department of Modern Hungarian Literature, Faculty of Humanities, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She received her PhD from ELTE in 2012 and her habilitation in 2025. She supervises doctoral students in the Hungarian Literature after 1945 programme of the Doctoral School of Literary Studies.

Her research centres on twentieth-century and contemporary Hungarian poetry, especially the poetry of Sándor Weöres, László Nagy and Attila József, the Hungarian neo-avant-garde and visual poetry. She examines László Nagy's visual poems and letter-images, the Paris-based Magyar Műhely circle and the poetry of Sándor Weöres from the perspective of the intersections between literature and the fine arts.

Her other main field is translation theory: she is a translator of Dante's Divine Comedy and organises translation seminars on Hungarian poetry in Italian. Her readings of poetry are also shaped by body theory, phenomenology and disability studies; she has published on the literary representation of illness (Frigyes Karinthy, Péter Esterházy, contemporary poetry), mythological criticism and genre theory.