
Gábor Kecskeméti was born on the 30th of November 1965 in Szolnok, Hungary. He studied Hungarian literature and history at the Faculty of Letters of the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, from 1984 to 1989. While a freshman, he attended Andor Tarnai’s seminars on early modern literary history; starting with his second year of studies he became Tarnai’s undergraduate teaching assistant for the seminars on The Significance of the Early Modern Occasional Sermon from the Perspective of the Sociology of Literature. It was during this assistantship that he committed himself to study the history and theory of early modern rhetoric. His critical edition of seventeenth century funeral sermons was published while only a senior student.

Since 1992 his full time employment has been at the Renaissance Department of the Institute for Literary Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences; the institute as of 2012 has been incorporated in a larger structure, the Research Centre of the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He started his activity as junior research fellow. He became research fellow in 1995, senior research fellow in 1998, and finally obtained the status of research adviser in 2009. He submitted his thesis for the degree of Candidate of Literature (C.Sc.) entitled, The Significance of Early Modern Hungarian Funeral Sermon in the Context of Intellectual History in 1996. The thesis was successfully defended in 1997, then transformed into a monograph, and published in 1998.

He has been involved and contributed to several successful projects related to both Hungarian and international scholarly enterprises.
He has been the organizer of several national conferences and editor of their ensuing proceedings. He has been a member of the organizing committee preparing the thirteenth Congress of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies in Budapest, during August 2006. As of 2011 he has commenced organizing a series of conferences systematically evaluating the Hungarian textology and philology as a discipline. The conferences have been held at Miskolc: Philology and Textology in Early Modern Hungarian Literature (2011); Issues Pertaining to Philology and Textology in the Editing the Classics of the 20th Century Hungarian Literature (2012); Textology, Philology, and Interpretation in the 18th and 19th Century Hungarian Literature (2013).
Since 1997 he has been a member of the Committee for Textology of HAS, became its co-chair for the period of 2001–2008, and finally its chair, between 2008–2014. He has been a member of the expert board for Hungarian Literature and Modern Philology of Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) between 2005 and 2008, and then from 2010 onwards. As of 2011 he undertook the duties of the chair of this board. He has been the co-chair of the Board for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Accreditation Committee from 2007 to 2010. For two years, between 2010 and 2012 he has been a member of the Hungarian Accreditation Committee for Humanities. He has been the elected member of the Committee on Literary Scholarship, Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2008. He has been the co-chair of the Committee on Literary and Linguistic Scholarship of the Regional Committee in Miskolc, Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2008, and acted as its chair between 2010–2017. For the period of 2010–2015 he was a member of the Advisory Board for the János Bolyai Research Scholarship. Since 2016, he has been a member of the committee of the International Society for Hungarian Studies. He is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Andor Tarnai Prize.
He has been teaching in higher education since 1990; he started his teaching activity as a visiting faculty first at the Eötvös Loránd University, then at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University. He has worked for three years (1996–1999), first as a senior lecturer, and then as a reader at the Janus Pannonius University’s Department of Classical Literary History and Comparative Literature in Pécs. Furthermore, he taught several courses for postgraduate Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian students at the East-Central European School in the Humanities of the Warsaw University.