Welcome

Welcome to CEU’s Summer University, a special study and professional development opportunity for academics and practitioners from all over the world. Please check out our course offerings for the summer of 2021 below.

CEU Summer University Goes Online in 2021

After a successful online summer school in 2020, considering prolonged uncertainties about travel and the possibility of onsite teaching, we have to offer remote courses in the coming summer again. Read more about our online offer.

We will accept all incoming applications by March 28. Check back for possible deadline extensions after March 31.

We look forward to meeting you in the virtual space in 2021.

Research-Intensive courses

ONLINE - Commoning Art and Culture
21 June - 28 June, 2021
This course asks how and why art and open societies have sustained each other across history, and how they may continue to do so beyond the crisis they jointly undergo in the current context of rapid technological, economic and political transformation. While focusing more specifically on artistic production, on its present crisis, and its possible futures, this course puts art in the broader perspective of the history of cultural production, and of its social, political and economic conditions of possibility at the modern intersection of state and market.
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ONLINE - Confronting the Crisis of Expertise: Historical Roots and Current Challenges
26 July - 30 July, 2021
In the post-Covid-19 world, the problems already experienced by democracies with regards to social divisions and diminishing trust in public institutions are exacerbated by a growing epistemic crisis concerning the simultaneous need and contestation of expertise for public policy purposes.
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ONLINE - Constitution-building in Africa
1 June - 30 June, 2021

History has seen several waves of constitution-building in the 20th century with an unparalleled boom starting in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And while experts recently announced the end of this boom in new constitutions after the Cold War, the world is witnessing another wave of constitution-building, this time predominately in Africa.

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ONLINE - Disruptive Narratives: Re-Constructing the Truth in the Age of Multimodal Propaganda
21 June - 25 June, 2021
An international group of scholars, representing three continents, and including world-renowned author Ian Buruma, proposes a five-day summer university course for advanced B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. students in fact-based narratives, also known as literary journalism in English language scholarship, reportage in the former Soviet area, or crónica in Latin America.
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ONLINE - Feminist Political Economy: Concepts and Tools to Analyse Intersecting Inequalities
5 July - 9 July, 2021
The past decade has seen the mainstreaming of concerns about inequalities, with the work of scholars and of social movements – from Occupy to the International Women’s Strike – centring the social and economic injustice created by persistent inequalities of income, gender, race and class.
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ONLINE - Identity: Indiscernibility, Essence, Time, and Composition
26 July - 31 July, 2021

Identity has been among the central concerns of Philosophy, from Parmenides to David Lewis. What are the formal properties of identity? Is identity necessary? What is the relationship between essence and identity? When is a thing existing at a certain time identical to a thing existing at a different time? And, more specifically, when is a person existing at a certain time identical to a person existing at a different time? Is identity absolute or relative? Real or constructed?

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ONLINE - Liberalism Infected: Revisiting Political and Socio-Legal Thought in the Aftermath of COVID-19
12 July - 23 July, 2021
The Covid-19 pandemic erupted amidst a deeper crisis facing liberal democracies and simultaneously extenuated it.
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ONLINE - New Frontiers in Romani Studies: Insights from Critical Race Theory
28 June - 8 July, 2021

This summer course offers a pioneering intellectual inquiry into the dynamics, varieties, and antagonisms of racialization and racial oppression of Romani people in relation to other racialized populations in Europe.

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ONLINE - Political Theology of the Early Church from its Formation to Justinian
19 July - 26 July, 2021
The course addresses an important topic in the history of Late Antiquity and Early Christianity: the theories of legitimacies, namely that of the Empire and the Church, and their struggle over the first six hundred years (from the first century to Justinian).
 
What were the reasons for the conflict and how did it play out in Late Antiquity?
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ONLINE - Representing the world in the developing mind: From objects to context
12 July - 17 July, 2021
How does the developing mind come to represent the world? Young infants have been proposed to use similar sources of information than adults in their object-based attention. From the development of memory over executive function, number cognition, and action understanding to Theory of Mind, studies have assumed that infants have a stable representation of objects, which they enumerate and track according to the perceptual input and maintain despite occlusion.
 
On the other hand, a number of limitations of early object cognition exist.
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ONLINE - Witchcraft Across Classical, Medieval, and Early-Modern Cultures in Europe: Researching and Teaching a Long-Term Historical Issue
20 July - 25 July, 2021

Beliefs in witchcraft are widely distributed both geographically and chronologically. At the European level, the accusations were put together within a coherent intellectual framework of reference. This is indeed part of a wider process of formation of scapegoat images on social targets such as the leper, the Jew, and the heretic, before getting to witches.

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Policy and Training courses

ONLINE - Cultures and Geographies of Energy Transitions
4 May - 18 June, 2021
This course brings together people with their own local stories of the struggles and success of people and communities transitioning towards a sustainable energy system. Participants in this course will learn the skills to tell stories and multi-media narratives around energy transitions.
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ONLINE - Designing a Collaborative Connected Liberal Arts Classroom
12 July - 16 July, 2021
This course offers participants the opportunity to learn about and experience an instructional design approach specific to the kinds of pedagogies that are a hallmark of Liberal Arts and Sciences education. Participants will engage in course and skills-building activities designed specifically with engaged and writing-rich pedagogies in mind.
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ONLINE - Interviewing Your Data: Tools and Methods for Data Journalists
14 June - 18 June, 2021

Free media is essential to hold the less-than transparent governments of Central and Eastern Europe to account. Key political and business actors are increasingly obfuscating their actions and limiting data access to escape public scrutiny. Effective investigative journalism requires a set of skills for obtaining and working with large datasets, and interpreting the patterns emerging from such data. 

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ONLINE - Introduction to Geospatial Technologies for Achieving SDGs – Demographic Considerations
5 July - 9 July, 2021
With the latest call by UN Secretary General for a “revolution” in the use of data for sustainable development, geospatial technologies have tremendous potential to boost the movement towards achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to improve monitoring of relevant SDGs’ targets and indicators. 
 
Geospatial technologies and remote sensing offer a crucial location element to the monitoring of SDGs .
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ONLINE - Mediation Theory and Skills
5 July - 9 July, 2021
Through lecture, discussion, demonstration and role-plays, students will be introduced to mediation theory and skills and examine the impact of culture and context on the consensus-building approach adopted.  Participants should come prepared for a highly engaging learning experience.
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ONLINE - Music as Heritage: an Interdisciplinary Approach in Theory and Practice
28 June - 6 July, 2021
Following the great success of the previous two editions of the Music as Heritage course (face-to-face in 2019 and online in 2020), in 2021 our main goal remains unchanged: to provide insight into the methodology and approaches of modern musicology as an integral part of heritage studies.
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ONLINE - The Quality of University Education: Harmonizing Purposes, Processes and Outcomes
28 June - 2 July, 2021
In the context of diversification of higher education systems and their sustainability, and the development of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), quality assurance, quality enhancement and the evaluation of university teaching and learning has been on the higher education policy agendas in Europe for the past twenty or so years.
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Courses re-scheduled for 2022

Urban governance and civic participation in words and stone. Urbanism in Central Europe 1200-1600

In light of the still ongoing difficulties of travel, CEU has decided to move the 2021 SUN courses online. Given the central role of site visits for this course, we have come to the decision to postpone it until the summer of 2022. 

In autumn 2021, a series of lectures related to the main themes of the summer university course will be announced. We’ll post more information later.