Courses 2011/12

This course is designed to train students in the close reading of classical Arabic texts. It will be based on selections of one of the central texts of Arabic thought, the fourteenth-century Muqaddima of Ibn Khaldun. This text allows students with intermediary Arabic reading competence to grasp larger arguments despite certain linguistic difficulties of the text. It is written in a style, which some commentators have described as nearly modern Arabic reportage, and as particularly eloquent. But it is also one which does not shy away from using the entire lexical, figurative and other resources of classical Arabic, including the technical vocabularies of the language.
The course will be based on the close reading of some of the Muqaddima’s passages: his critique of historiography, his ideas discussion of the nature of human kind, the development of the Arabic language, and of the genres of Arabic writings.

Texts will be distributed to students taking this course. There

Appropriate for all students

The course is intended to give an overview of the main European artistic trends from Art Nouveau /Secession to Post-Modernism by concentrating on the changing role of the arts in society and the changing attitudes of the artists to their vocation, as well as the influence of the art market.

It will focus on painting, viewed in its social, cultural and national contexts, and will analyse the relationship between art and political and /or philosophical ideas. Nevertheless the most important achievements of architecture and urbanism in the 20th century will also be included.

Changing world views, as manifested in works of art, will be analysed from a social, political and philosophical point of view.

This class combines a basic survey in Islamic history based on lectures in the first half with seminar discussions on assigned readings in the second half of the each class that examine scholarship and approaches to Islamic borderlands and frontiers from early Islamic conquests in the 7th century to the rising threat of colonial Christian Empires in the Ottoman Empire /Middle East in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since the rise of Islam rulers of Islamic polities demonstrated a “flexible imperialism” in conquered territories and borderlands; however, the “vanquished” peoples and their traditions often “conquered” the Muslim conquerors themselves. Thus, the history of rapidly expanding Islamic frontiers is far from a linear success-story of “syncretism,” as Islamdom’s absorption of diverse cultures and peoples inevitably led to the emergence of local Islams that were not always acceptable to the religious establishment closer to the centers of Muslim power. In many cases, these “

This course is open for all PhD and MA students from all CEU departments. The course is neither co-requisite nor pre-requisite of any other course.
Course will deal with some key controversial and debatable topics of the East European history (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus’).
It aims to develop innovative and scholarly relevant perspectives on our subjects, attacking them from a non-ideological, comparative and preferably multidisciplinary angle, combining tools of historical, sociological and anthropological studies
It goes without saying that we will foster a consistently critical approach to the present day theories and representations of the East European past and present.
All topics are dealing with crucial aspects of specifically comparative history of European societies, Russia included. Societies of Central, East-Central and Eastern Europe stand in focus of our attention, and it means that problems treated in our course are closely related to major

20th century has been “a century of wars, global and local, hot and cold” (Catherine Lutz). The course explores the different ways in which war and political violence are remembered through a gender lens especially focusing on Holocaust and genocide against Armenians. Central questions include: what are the gendered effects of war, political violence, and militarization? How have wars, genocide and other forms of political violence been narrated and represented? How do women remember and narrate gendered violence in war? How are post-conflict processes and transitional justice gendered? What is the relationship between testimony, storytelling, and healing? How is the relationship between the “personal” and the “public/national” reconstructed in popular culture, film, literature, and (auto)biographical texts dealing with war, genocide, and other forms of political violence? How are wars memorialized and gendered through monuments, museums, and other memory sites? Besides others,

On the eve of the Great War the educated classes of the Habsburg and Romanov Empires remained a tiny elite, even if the universities had begun to facilitate upward social mobility, and more functions for the "intellectual" were gradually taking form. This course explores themes connecting intellectuals and the formative experiences of the wider European war. The "mobilization of intellect" involved more than literary figures offering patriotic rationales for victory. We seek to understand how the war accelerated prior trends or initiated new ones in various cultural domains, and what legacies the war had for intellectual life after Trianon and Brest-Litovsk.

This course addresses some aspects of the wide problem of political legitimacy. We will try to examine how the European states in the 19th century tried to present themselves as "just" and "legitimate". We will look at specimens of 19th century political theory and at pieces of propaganda; we will try to analyze the state ceremonies and symbols, looking both at written sources and at iconography. Without omitting Britain, France or Prussia, the course will put special stress on the Habsburg Monarchy, trying to explain how a multinational empire tried to establish its legitimate character in the era of growing nationalisms.

This course wants to explore the (lost) world of the multicultural cities of the Habsburg Empire. On the contrary to the countryside, cities were often mixed, especially on the margins of the Empire: Banat, Transylvania, Upper Hungary, Bucovina, but also at his very center as the example of Vienna shows.

Current debates on the secular and the religious call for a rethinking of the historical, analytical and conceptual frames under which common concepts of these two were conceived. Secularization thesis arose from particular developments within (Western) Christianity, and it expanded into religions across the world predicated upon secularist ideas. Much of the academic and public discussions alike draw on contemporary developments in and with Christian and Muslim communities in secular and Muslim contexts. While Christianity at least in its Western versions seems to have reached a certain dynamic in relation to the secular, Islam and to some extent Eastern Christianity are still seen as normative categories, inherently not open to secularism and emblematically embodied in the question of church/state relation and thus dependent on endogenous, religious explanations for secularism. The course will compare new theoretical approaches and debates, and a number of case studies pertaining

This course aims to elaborate a range of comparative approaches to crucial topics in history of Eastern Europe. East /West, Asia/ Europe comparison will stand in center of our attention.
The course discusses major trends in political, cultural and social evolution of territories which make the present day Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and, in part, Poland in the XVI – XIX centuries, in comparison to structures of western and “oriental” history. The main focus is placed on pre-modern and modern structures which emerged here in a result of 1) geopolitical contexts 2) encounter of various civilizational traditions (local, European and “Asian”) 3) modernization process. The course sees these three aspects of Russian and Eurasian history as deeply interconnected. It challenges conventional (national, imperial, modernization) paradigms of historical writings on Eastern Europe.
How strong were Byzantine, Asian and European influences on Russia? What was peculiar in the Russian

This course addresses aspects of the hegemony of a part of Europe over the rest of the continent and the world during much of modern history. Among the criteria for conceptualizing and representing this hegemony, preoccupation will be with variables in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge.
Europeans have conceived of their civilization as a system which is coherent, but at the same time, emulative: formed in a dialogue and dialectical contestation of perceived core zones, and between them and the outside world . That would certainly include the sense that scientific achievement is a prerequisite and a token of excellence at local, national, continental and global levels. In attempts to map the geography of modern knowledge, its production has been often conceived in terms of the processing of locally collected pieces of information as systems of knowledge in “centers of calculation”, to be then disseminated for universal consumption. Not necessarily

This course is intended to figure out the main parameters of metropolitan life characterizing the 19th and 20th century. In seeking the social and cultural meaning of the modern metropolis, one is confronted with the proliferation of difference that dominates metropolitan realm. Therefore it is unlikely that there is a single „text of the city” that would reveal the deep and hidden substance of the city in the moden era. The course organized in an analytical fashion focuses on the most diverse spatial implications of a distinctive metropolitan life. The empirical evidences are taken both from North America (a case in point is New York), and Western or Central Europe (London, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Prague). The emphasis is laid not on the individual profile of the cities to be discussed, but the common features on the one hand and the varieties of such a metropolitanism on the other hand. 

The course combines an introduction into the major methodological developments in the history of political ideas with a thematic overview of political thought in our region roughly between 1900 and 1945. It uses the excerpts, previously unavailable in English, provided by the collective project Regional Identity Discourses in Central and Southeast Europe (1775-1945). The collection of these texts makes it possible to analyze and compare ‘in depth’ various ideological traditions that were formative of the national discourses of Central and Southeast Europe.

The aim of this seminar looks at selected problems in recent (or not so recent) historiography of Central Europe (understood here, vaguely, as the Polish lands and as the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy)  in 19th – 20th centuries. The scheme given below is a draft proposal, open to negotiations, according to the interests of participants who are invited (this being a seminar, not a lecture) to participate actively.