Máté Rigó (MA 2009, PhD candidate, Cornell University). "I’d known that CEU has one of the strongest concentration of scholars working on East-Central Europe within Anglo-American academia, and as I was committed to study the history of the region I decided to apply. I’d also taken courses previously as a visiting student and I was impressed by the interdisciplinary vibe of CEU. My year as an M.A. student at the CEU History Department enabled me to achieve a thorough grounding in regional historiography, and become familiar with multiple perspectives, theories and methods of writing history, ranging from intellectual, urban and cultural history. I am indebted to CEU for the academic training I’ve received and the valuable friendships formed with students of my class, most of whom continued to study East-Central European history all around Europe and North-America."
Bojan Aleksov received his PhD at CEU and is now a Lecturer at University College London School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies. Prior to his current position, he was a Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin and a Max Weber Fellow at European University Institute in Florence, Italy. According to Aleksov, “I chose CEU because of its academic reputation for excellence….It helped me enormously as it made a scholar out of me and trained me to write an excellent dissertation which I later turned into a book that secured my current position.”
Jaroslav Miller completed his doctoral studies at CEU in 2004, having begun as an MA student in 1996. He is currently a Professor of History and the Director of the Historical Institute at Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. He has twice been appointed an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (2006 in Marburg, 2010 in Münster), and in 2008 was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Georgia, USA. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he held a Guest Professorship at the University of Western Australia in Perth and is a 2012 nominee for the Gerda Henkel Prize. Miller chose CEU for a variety of reasons, including the “ strong wish to integrate myself into the international community of students and later...scholars…” Miller writes: “My long-term experience with CEU helped me substantially and may justly be considered the milestone which predetermined not only my subsequent academic career but also (perhaps more importantly) my personal life. Moreover, I may rely upon the increasingly dense network of the CEU alumni. Many of them became intellectual and political leaders in many (and especially in Central European) countries and respected scholars in research institutions worldwide.”
Liliya Berezhnaya completed her doctoral studies at CEU in 2004. She worked for Pasts Inc. Center for Historical Studies at CEU, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich for two years. Since 2009 she has been directing the project “Religion and Politics” in the Cluster of Excellency at the University of Münster (Germany) within her habilitation track. Parallel to that she teaches East European history in the History Department at the University of Muenster. According to Berezhnaya, “I think the CEU experience is attractive for those who are ready to update their knowledge gained at local academic schools in an international institution; to get to know the brightest spectrum of new methodologies and approaches. In fact, CEU is a post-graduate and Advanced Studies school, which is a perfect spring-board for further academic career. Learn more about Berezhnaya’s current research.
Marius Turda completed his doctoral studies at CEU in 2002. He is currently an associate professor in the Faculty of History, Philosophy and Religion at Oxford Brookes University and the director of the Cantemir Institute at the University of Oxford, an institute founded for the interdisciplinary study of Central and Eastern Europe in its wider European and global context. He also founded the Working Group on the History of Race and Eugenics (HRE) in 2006 at Oxford Brookes University and he coordinates the book series CEU Studies in the History of Medicine. Turda chose the CEU because, “In the mid-1990s, CEU was the only university in Central and Eastern Europe where one could learn something different than one’s national history, interact with international students and professors, and attend the public lectures of the some of the biggest names in the humanities. CEU strengthened my belief that one best learns from others; that cross-national and cross-cultural communication is essential and inter-disciplinarity possible.”
Katherine Sorrels received her MA from CEU in 2000. She is currently an Assistant Professor of the history of modern German-speaking Europe at the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio. She chose to attend CEU after studying in a similar international environment at the University of Graz during her undergraduate study. In the words of Sorrels, “I’ve benefitted tremendously from my year at CEU. First of all, I took a range of excellent courses in history and several of the interdisciplinary programs (e.g., Gender Studies and Nationalism Studies). The result was that I entered my PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh with both a broad awareness of what was going on in my field as well as a level of focus which undoubtedly eased my progress through the program…I made both friends and professional contacts at CEU with whom I continue to stay in touch. This network of friends and colleagues in the region is probably the most rewarding long-term benefit of my time in Budapest.”
