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 next summer below. 

We are planning to run face-to-face courses in Budapest. If, however, the pandemic continues to pose health risks, the majority of the courses will be delivered online. Updates on the final format of the program will be available around the end of March, 2021.

We look forward to meeting you in person at the Budapest campus or in the virtual space in 2021.

Research-Intensive courses

Commoning Art and Culture
19 June - 29 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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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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Constitution-building in Africa
28 June - 7 July, 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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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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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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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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New Frontiers in Romani Studies: Insights from Critical Race Theory
28 June - 9 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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Political Theology of the Early Church from its Formation to Justinian
20 July - 30 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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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.
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Urban governance and civic participation in words and stone. Urbanism in Central Europe 1200-1600
19 July - 28 July, 2021

Throughout history cities and towns fulfilled a series of complex functions. They emerged in order to fulfil a key role in the production, exchange and consumption of commodities, as well as to serve as administrative centres for a district, region or realm. Therefore, they are characterized by populations larger, denser and more complex than that of the surrounding countryside.

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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. All this, along with the late medieval construction of the concept of the witches’ Sabbath, require a multidisciplinary way of approach as well as an open-minded sight in order to be historically contextualized and discussed.

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Policy and Training courses

Cultures and Geographies of Energy Transitions
7 June - 17 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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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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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.
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Introduction to Geospatial Technologies for Achieving SDGs – Demographic Considerations
5 July - 9 July, 2021
With the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the call by UN Secretary General for a “revolution” in the use of data for sustainable development, geospatial technologies have tremendous potential to effectively and efficiently monitor SDG progress.
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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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Music as Heritage: an Interdisciplinary Approach in Theory and Practice
28 June - 7 July, 2021
 
Following the great success of the previous two editions of the Music as Heritage course, in 2021 our main goal is unchanged: to provide insight into the methodology and approaches of modern musicology as an integral part of heritage studies. We use music as a tool for analyzing and describing social changes, the interaction of state policies, culture, cultural heritage, and audiences.
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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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Online WINTER courses in the academic year of 2020/21

11 Januar - 8 February, 2021

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) became essential tools not only in academic research but also in our daily life. GIS includes (but not limited to) mechanisms of geographic data collection, storage, visualization and analysis. The range of available technologies and application areas is wide and the choice of solution depends on issues concerned and level of computer literacy.
 
 

11 January - 8 February, 2021

Every hour numerous satellites generate hundreds of images of Earth surface, capturing multiple aspects of anthropogenic activities as well as environmental processes. For many years having access to, analyzing and interpreting these petabytes of information (very Big Data) was a privilege of a handful of experts. Latest development in computer technologies and appearance of new tools allowed free access and easy use of that knowledge not only to researches but also to professionals in various domains.
 
 

18 January - 22 January, 2021

The main, intensive part of the course will last for 5 days (January 18-22). After this, the course will switch into a more self-guided mode, supplemented by one-on-one tutorials and a weekly group meeting on Fridays from January 29 to February 26, 2021.

The course is co-hosted by the Blinken Open Society Archives, CEU’s progressive hub for digital Cold War history and a natural home for scholarship conducted in this area. Our first 2019 course already based its demo datasets on digitized content from the Blinken OSA collections: records of the Radio Free Europe research institute, and of RFE’s telex communication between New York and Munich in the 1960s. There are a lot of training schools in digital humanities methods around the world, but very few which are so focused on a particular subject area and dedicated to building collaborative digital history projects around a discrete set of topics. By basing our course and its follow-up activities at Blinken OSA, we aim to seed a new wave of digital history projects that revolve around Cold War history and oppositional cultures. 

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