Past Programs

Beyond War and Peace: Rethinking the Balkans for Ukraine

Course co-directors: Aleksandar Pavlović and Olesia Marković The southeastern peninsula of the European continent, more recognizable under its loaded term the Balkans, is a region of stunning ethnic and religious diversity and rich history. Neglected and exoticized at the same…

European Union Enlargement and Reform: A Common Path for Ukraine’s European Future

Course co-directors: Veronica Anghel and Inna Melnykovska The course explores the European Union’s revived enlargement process with a focus on Ukraine’s accession. To welcome new members, the European Union will need to transform its institutions, policies, and capabilities. The heightened…

Cultural Diplomacy during the War: Practices and Institutional Strategies

Course director: Yana Barinova The course aims to provide a comprehensive and historically informed perspective on international cultural negotiations under the constraints installed by wars and terrorism. It seeks to equip students with theoretical and practical knowledge in the realm…

Sustaining Rule of Law and Democracy in Ukraine amidst War and Post-War Reconstruction

Course co-directors: Olena Boryslavs’ka and Nazarii Stetsyk The course will deal with international and national legal orders under the pressure of wartime experiences. It will examine the social and biopolitical contexts in dealing with mass violence and the reframing of…

Rethinking Nationalism: Conceptual Frameworks and Political Challenges

Course co-directors: Valeria Korablyova and Vladimir Petrović The course will concern national belonging and its components, including experience, language, collective sense-making, national self-determination and popular sovereignty, the tension between plural and unitary conceptions of nationhood in their historical variety and…

Intellectual Debates in Modern Ukrainian History and Contemporary Public Sphere

Course co-directors: Ostap Sereda and Balázs Trencsényi This course will be structured around the key contested issues in modern Ukrainian intellectual life. It will provide a historical overview of the main political, social, and cultural debates, starting from the Maksymovych-Pogodin…

Ukraine’s EU Integration: Compliance and Resilience in Times of War & Geopolitical Rivalries

Inna Melnykovska, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Central European University Nazarii Stetsyk, Department of Legal Studies, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv Ukraine’s integration into the European Union (EU) will intertwine with the processes of Ukraine’s war-time resilience and…

The Politics of Warfare: Key Concepts in the History of Modern Military Thought

Tetiana Zemliakova, Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow, European University Institute This course introduces students to the intellectual and political history of modern warfare. It studies the principal concepts of military theory and practice by probing their political genealogy and ideological descent.…

Identities-Borders-Orders: Migration and Belonging

Viktoriya Sereda, Professor, Ukrainian Catholic University, Senior Fellow, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin Oksana Mikheieva, Professor, Ukrainian Catholic University and European University Viadrina The title of the course derives from the conceptual model of the anthropologist Steven Vertovec who demonstrates through…

Sexuality and Decoloniality 

Nadiya Chushak, Professor, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Maria Mayerchyk, Senior Research Associate, Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine, Kule Project Archivist, Kule Folklore Centre, University of Alberta Olga Plakhotnik, Researcher, University of Greifswald What is sexuality…

Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Counter-Cultures in Ukraine and East Central Europe

Bohdan Shumylovych, Head of Public History Programs at the Center for Urban History, Lviv Balazs Trencsényi, Professor, CEU History Department, and lead researcher of CEU Democracy Institute The course intends to give an theoretically informed overview of counter-cultures in Ukraine…

Western Balkans: Imperial Legacies, Nation-Building, State Disintegration

Vladimir Petrović, Research Professor, Institute of Contemporary History, Belgrade, and CEU Democracy Institute The southeastern peninsula of the European continent, more recognizable under its loaded term “the Balkans,” is a region of stunning ethnic and religious diversity and rich history.…

Imagined Geography of Ukraine from the Late Eighteenth till the Late Twentieth Centuries: Regions, Cities, Landscapes, Population

Kateryna Dysa, Associate Professor, Department of History, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy The course will explore how various entities of Ukraine, such as regions, cities and landscapes were imagined and constructed from the late eighteenth till the end of the…

Rethinking Ukrainian Studies in a Global Context

Ostap Sereda, Associate Professor in History at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and recurrent guest professor at CEU Vladimir Petrovic, Research Professor, Institute of Contemporary History, Belgrade, and CEU Democracy Institute Balazs Trencsényi, CEU, Professor, History Department, lead researcher…

War and Media

Oksana Sarkisova, Research Fellow, Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, Director of Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Budapest, and co-founder of Visual Studies Platform at CEU Our understanding, interpretation, and remembrance of large-scale collisions and transformative social…

Social Entrepreneurship: Emergence, Models, and Impact

Tetiana Vodotyka, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Institute of History of Ukraine, Department Member, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen The course explores the concept of social entrepreneurship and its potential to create positive change in society. The course begins by introducing the…

Public History

Viktoriya Sereda, Research Fellow, Imre Kertesz Kolleg, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Senior Researcher, National Academy of Science, Professor, Department of Sociology, Ukrainian Catholic University This course aims at interactive collaborative discovery of how public history functions in the time of…

Re-interpreting European Security in the aftermath of Russia’s war in Ukraine

Xymena Kurowska, Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, Central European University This course re-examines traditional, critical and emerging concepts and problematics of European security in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine. It does so by situating the Ukrainian experience…

Rule of Law and Human Rights: Old Challenges and New Opportunities in Times of War and Uncertainty

Nazar Stetsyk, Associate Professor, Department of Theory and Philosophy of Law, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv This course offers a study of rule of law and human rights in the shadow of the war in Ukraine, in a broader…

(Post)conflict Transformations in the Western Balkans: Drawing Insights for Ukraine?

Vladimir Petrovic, Research Professor, Institute of Contemporary History, Belgrade, and CEU Democracy Institute What went wrong in the Balkans, what can be done about it, and what can we learn from it? At the very end of the Cold War,…

Evidence and Truth – Reflecting on the War in Ukraine in a Global Context

21–29 January 2023 The winter school reflects on the key intellectual problems raised by the ongoing war and the specific challenges facing students and scholars when they seek to reflect on processes happening in “real-time.” We start from the imperative…

Displacement and (Trans)National Solidarities in Ukraine in the Global Contexts (Society track)

Course Director Viktoriya Sereda (Ukrainian Catholic University, The Forum transregionale Studien) This course aims at the examination of various social impacts of migration and displacement processes in the contemporary world with a special focus on multi-level challenges brought by the…

Ideologies on the Move: Transnational Ideas in Local Intellectual Cultures

Course Director Tetiana Zemliakova (European University Institute) The course seeks to introduce students to the intellectual history of principal modern ideologies. It approaches liberalism, socialism, conservatism, and anarchism in their theoretical continuity and historical intermittency. Each module comprises the study…

Heritage-Based Post-War Urban Reconstruction in Ukraine

Course Directors Dóra Mérai (Central European University), Loes Veldpaus, (Newcastle University), Volodymyr Kulikov (Ukrainian Catholic University) The course aims to reflect on a heritage-based post-war redevelopment of Ukraine by addressing problems and approaches in a theoretical context, examining and learning…

War, Memory, and the City. Shaping Collective Remembrance and Re-Articulation of Past in Ukraine in European Contexts

Course Director Tetiana Vodotyka (Institute of History of Ukraine, NASU / Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) The course aims to examine how contested memory of the First and Second World Wars and mass violence was reshaped in Ukrainian and East European urban social…

History of the Public Sphere in Ukraine and East Central Europe

Course director Ostap Sereda (Central European University, Ukrainian Catholic University) The course aims at introducing and exploring the applicability of the concept of the public sphere for the analysis of intellectual and social life in Ukraine and its East European…

Ukraine: Imperial, Soviet, Independent, European

Course directors Vladimir Petrovic (Boston University), Nazarii Stetsyk (Ivan Franko National University of Lviv) The course seeks to examine past problems, present challenges, and future prospects of Ukraine in multiple comparative, disciplinary and transnational frameworks. It aims to situate the…

Making Ukraine Visible – Images, Narratives, Institutions

10–19 July 2022 The summer school reflects on how Ukrainian culture, identity, and institutional practices can be valorized in the global discussion and how resilient civic and academic organizations can be created and maintained in the face of different threats…

Transformation, Conflict, and Migration: Study of Exceptions from Rules, Vulnerability to Risks and Unacceptable Conditions

Course Director ​​Volodymyr Artiukh (University of Oxford) The course focuses on social integration and national minorities, socio-economic approaches to inclusion and exclusion, gender, transnational networks and diasporas, corruption, and transparency.

Between Norms and Realities: Challenges to Europeanization, Democratization and the Rule of Law in a Transnational Context

Course Directors Nazarii Stetsyk (Ivan Franko National University of Lviv), Vladimir Petrovic (Boston University), Oleksiy Kononov (Central European University) The course focuses on the ambiguities of European integration, studying post-communist authoritarianism, varieties of democracy and constitutionalism, and human rights.

Culture and Heritage Studies

Dóra Mérai (Central European University) The course focuses on memory cultures and urban heritage management, narratives, journalism, new media, cultural diplomacy, art, audiovisual studies, and new media documenting resistance.

Symbolic Geography, Contested Identities, and Mass Violence: Ukrainian History in European Contexts

Course Director Vladimir Petrovic (Boston University) The courses focuses on questions of reshaping of the symbolic geography of Europe, studying communist and post-communist Central and Eastern Europe comparatively, political violence, and memory politics.