Between Pasts and Futures: Competing Legacies, Narratives and Visions of the Future in Ukraine and Beyond (1 July–12 July, Budapest and Lviv)
The 5th IUFU Summer School will bring together 50 selected participants from the IUFU student cohort in two parallel sessions, organized at CEU Budapest campus (4–11 July) and the Lviv Center for Urban History (1 July–7 July).
The Budapest program builds on the intellectual perspectives developed around selected themes of the ongoing IUFU courses, including war and new media, Ukrainian and Soviet modernisms, European integration, and transnational connections with the Balkans and Georgia, as well as on related issues, such as the role of civil society in preserving and renewing democracy, and the long legacies of genocidal violence and how societies reckon with them. Reflecting on these themes, we plan to explore different temporalities of the war and Ukrainian culture, competing legacies (national, regional, supra-national), and also the multiplicity of visions of the future.
The Summer School program will include lectures followed by discussions, workshops, and art evenings (documentary films, poetry, artist talks), a city walk, and an archival visit. We seek to strengthen student engagement by organizing thematic student writing workshops, presentations, and discussions of student research projects, individual mentoring meetings with guest scholars and IUFU faculty, as well as joint student-professor roundtables.
Likewise, the Lviv session will focus on the theme of time and temporality during and after war. Drawing on the metaphors of kairos (the moment of change), chronos (continuity), and ouroboros (the cycle), participants will engage with questions about people’s relation to time during protracted uncertainty, ways of connecting to the past and anticipating of the future within “uncanny present,” dealing with temporal deceleration and acceleration, the reinterpretation of past wars and conflicts from the perspective of the present war, as well as long-term work with the consequences of loss and destruction, and the search for solutions for post-war recovery.
The program will include meetings with researchers and practitioners, presentations of source collections from the Center for Urban History, film screenings and discussions, a city walk, and visits to cultural sites including the Natural History Museum, the Astronomical Observatory, and the public history space “After Silence.” A practical workshop will invite participants to engage with the Telegram Archive of the war and present findings in written or artistic form.
In order to create interaction between the two sessions, students currently in Ukraine will have the possibility to join the first two days of the program in Lviv, after which the Budapest cohort will travel onward, and the Lviv cohort will continue its program.
The program will cover travel, accommodation, and living expenses.
How to apply? Applications should include either a short (up to 5 minutes) self-made video or a short (up to 1 page) motivation letter describing the applicant’s experience in one of the IUFU courses in the current semester, which made them see certain academic and intellectual problems from a new angle, as well as the applicant’s vision of the problems related to the topic of the winter school. Applications can be submitted in English or Ukrainian. Selection will take into account the impressions of the course directors and mentors about the student’s involvement in the ongoing courses. Please also mark your preference for the program you would like to attend.
Deadline for applications: 12 May 2026, midnight CET. Applications should be submitted to the following form: https://forms.gle/aHER3dTAujJgQNqD7
If you have any questions, please contact Nadiia Chervinska (chervinska_nadiia@student.ceu.edu) and Kateryna Osypchuk (osypchuk_kateryna@student.ceu.edu).