A three-year research project dedicated to the audiencehistories, actualizations and futures for European national museums. National museums collect, preserve and display nations' most cherished objects to tell about nations' senses of themselves. Today, they are contested institutions, often squeezed between conflicting demands.
With the participation of the University of Helsinki, the Central European University, the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte, and the University College London this project involves a series of meetings with an aim to reflect on a new historical underpinning of the European integration project against the backdrop of the severe legitimacy problems it is suffering from.
The project is funded by the Higher Education Support Program of the Open Society Institute, Budapest and administered by the help of CEU’s Special Projects Office. This is a three-year project to develop Comparative History as a stream/grouping of courses within a set of target departments in our Region – Central Europe, South East Europe, Eastern Europe --, with CEU acting as the core and the co-ordinator of the group.
This project is devised by a group of historians from different national and intellectual backgrounds, as well as of different generations and academic positions. Its aim is to write a new narrative of European history in a polycentric context, adopting a non-Eurocentric perspective, focusing on science – its history, emergence and worldwide circulation – in a crucial period for the construction of European ‘modernity’.
Building on previous research on the collectivization of agriculture in communist dictatorship, this comparative project deals with the collectivization of agriculture in Eastern Europe between the 1930s and 1980s. On the basis of a re-examination of the collectivization enforced in the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s, empirical work will concentrate on the transfer and (selective) appropriation of the Soviet model in East European states (GDR, Czechoslovakia Hungary, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania).
The current project aims at fostering new research on the shared history of Hungary and Romania by employing relational and transnational approaches, as part of a more general effort to rewrite continental history from an integrated perspective. East-Central European countries share a common historical past that goes far back in time to enduring medieval and early modern imperial legacies.
The subject of the proposed research is the social mechanisms of justifying and maintaining the communist dictatorships in Central Europe. The purpose, however, is not to merely pursue the tradition of looking for the social reasons for supporting the one-party regimes or the practices of adaptation to the new circumstances.
This project aims at initiating and completing the first stage of a major, unprecedented survey of the state of the art in historical sciences in the ten 'EU accession countries'.
The project has been initiated in Pasts, Inc. and hosted by Collegium Budapest. It consisted of a preparatory Workshop, held September 11-13, 2006 at Collegium Budapest, and a research period over the calendar year 2007, during which some participants of the project worked as Fellows at the Collegium for various lengths of time, others worked as external contributors.
The primary target of the Regional Seminar in Recent History was the improvement of higher education in the field of 20th century history in Central and Eastern Europe. The seminar series was designed to contribute to this purpose, first of all, by the initiation of new courses and curricula concerning contemporary history in a comparative manner focusing mainly on the region, but taking into consideration the broader European perspective.
