Previous Courses and Initiatives | Central European University

Spring 2023 Course Information

During the semester 153 students participated in the courses.

Core course:

Rethinking Ukrainian Studies in a Global Context (Ostap Sereda, Vladimir Petrović, Balázs Trencsényi), supported by DAAD, implemented in cooperation with the University of Jena

Six thematic courses:

Public History (Viktoriya Sereda and Bohdan Shumylovych) supported by DAAD, implemented in cooperation with the University of Jena
Re-interpreting European Security in the aftermath of Russia’s war in Ukraine (Thomas Fetzer, Xymena Kurowska, Maksym Yakovlyev, Kateryna Zarembo)
Rule of Law and Human Rights: Old Challenges and New Opportunities in Times of War and Uncertainty (Nazarii Stetsyk and Dmytro Vovk, supported by the IIE Centennial Fellowship; the class is open only for students with legal education)
Social Entrepreneurship: Emergence, Models, and Impact (Volodymyr Kulikov, Tetiana Vodotyka, and Dóra Mérai)
War and Media (Taras Fedirko and Oksana Sarkisova)
(Post)conflict Transformations in the Western Balkans: Drawing Insights for Ukraine? (Vladimir Petrović)

In addition, we offered a Graduate Masterclass on Entering Global Academia (Alexandra Vacroux, Davis Center at Harvard University).

65 research scholarships (up to 800 Euro per semester) were available on a competitive basis for those students who wish to implement a special empirical or theoretical project in addition to their course work in IUFU, drawing on their academic background, previous work, and relevant to the current situation and/or related to the themes of the courses. Students receiving research funding submitted research papers at the end of the semester. The results of these projects will be published on the site Visible Ukraine (visibleukraine.org).

Application Forms

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2023 Winter School

Evidence and Truth – Reflecting on the War in Ukraine in a Global Context (21 - 29 January 2023)

The winter school component of IUFU hosted 26 selected participants from the cohort of current IUFU-students. It was held at the Budapest campus of CEU, with personal attendance, creating a community for the students who come from different regions and institutions. It reflected on the key intellectual problems raised by the ongoing war and the specific challenges facing students and scholars. We started from the imperative of collecting and evaluating evidence in view of the destruction of cultural heritage, war crimes, Russian propaganda campaigns, ongoing social processes such as migration and displacement, as well as the complexities of national and local identity.

These challenges put a huge burden on all students and scholars as they have to be performed under extreme time pressure and often in existential precarity. All this is made even more pressing by the recent technological shift toward massification of digital images with their inherent manipulability, the rise of big data, the systematic deploying of fake news, fragmenting the public sphere and destabilizing traditional institutions of democracy. Therefore, while the last decades tended towards relativizing truth and pointing to the unavoidable situatedness and subjectivity of any speaker and assertion, the ongoing war necessarily brings back questions of ascertaining truth claims, producing and evaluating evidence, pushing us beyond just registering the incompatibility of perspectives.

Along these lines, rather than just debating on these issues, students and lecturers searched for active and innovative strategies on how Ukrainian culture, identity, and institutional practices can be studied and valorized in view of these challenges and how resilient civic and academic organizations can be created and maintained in the context of the war and the postwar reconstruction.

Winter School program (pdf)

2022 Fall Semester

In Fall 2022 IUFU offered a trans-disciplinary core course and six further courses in four thematic tracks (History, Culture and Heritage Studies, Society, Politics and Law) as well as Mentoring and Academic English classes.

Core course: Ukraine: Imperial, Soviet, Independent, European
History of Public Sphere in Ukraine and East Central Europe (History track)
War, Memory, and the City. Shaping Collective Remembrance and Re-Articulation of Past in Ukraine in European Contexts(Culture/Heritage track)
Ideologies on the Move: Transnational Ideas in Local Intellectual Cultures (Politics/Law track)
Migration, Displacement and (Trans)National Solidarities in Ukraine in the Global Contexts (Society track)
Heritage-Based Post-War Urban Reconstruction in Ukraine (Culture/Heritage track)
Ukraine in/and Europe: Frameworks of European Integration(Politics/Law track)

Courses 1. thru 5. were co-funded by the German DAAD action, "Ukraine digital: Ensuring academic success in times of crisis," and implemented in partnership with the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the University of Jena. Course 7 was implemented in cooperation with Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and the Department of Political Science and Management, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway.

2022 Summer School

Making Ukraine Visible -- Images, Narratives, Institutions

35 selected participants from the cohort of IUFU-students participated in the summer school, held parallelly at CEU Budapest campus and the Ucranian Catholic University campus in Lviv (10-19 July).

Participating students reflected 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, coming from external oppression, or from dysfunctional, hybrid or openly authoritarian regimes. Students also discussed audiovisual and teaching materials that could articulate their voice in the debate about postwar Ukraine both internally and externally and were invited to design the curriculum for different possible courses on topics they consdered the most relevant.

The program consisted of

Thematic discussions on literature, cinematography, media, and memory politics
Visiting institutions and communities that play an important role in defending human rights and in maintaining the alternative public sphere
City walks in Budapest and Lviv about memory politics (monumentalization of the past, competing narratives, heritage projects, etc) and a daytrip to Bratislava
Film Club: watching and discussing movies dealing with ethnical, generational and cultural conflicts and competing memories in East Central Europe

Program Directors of the Summer School: Péter Csunderlik, Assistant Professor, ELTE University Budapest, Institute of Historical Studies and Volodymyr Sklokin, Associate Professor, Department of History, Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv

Organizers: Ostap Sereda, Daniel Palm, Balazs Trencsényi, and Renáta Uitz.

Coordinators: Lilla Nagy and Edit Jeges

Detailed program (pdf)

2022 Spring Semester

Professors Stetsyk and Petrovic with students of IUFU in Lviv, April 2022

In the 2022 Spring Semester (April-June), 130 students representing 36 Ukrainian universities and academic institutions from 15 cities attended our classes, taught by 37 mentors and 80 lecturers (most of them teaching pro bono).