Our two workshops focused on Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia return for the Fall 2023 semester! Join us for any of the following events:

Friday, September 8, 2:00 pm: Bénédicte Santoire (University of Ottawa) presents new research on “Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Long-term Protracted Conflicts: Exploring the Cases of Moldova and Georgia“. Register via Zoom registration link 

Friday, September 29, 12:30 pm: Megan Buskey shares her book on Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return, in discussion with Brigid O’Keeffe (Brooklyn College, CUNY). This will be a hybrid event at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and online via Zoom registration link.

Tuesday, October 10, 2:15 pm:  Kristen Ghodsee (University of Pennsylvania) in conversation with journalist Liza Featherstone on Everyday Utopia, ​​“You and Me and Baby Makes Misery: Expanding Our Networks of Love and Care,” and Alexandra Kollontai. This is a hybrid event held at the Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library, and via Zoom with this registration link.  

Friday, October 13, 2:00 pm: Kenneth Yin (LaGuardia Community College, CUNY) presents research on the Dungan literature and culture of Central Asia. Online only: Zoom registration link.

Friday, October 27, 12:30 pm: Yana Primachenko (Princeton College and Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) presents new comparative analysis on the “Great Victory” in Soviet and Russian memory culture. Online only: Zoom registration link.

Monday, October 30, 2:15 pm: Cynthia Enloe (Clark University), launches her book, Twelve Feminist Lessons of War, in person at Women’s Center, Brooklyn College, CUNY, in coordination the new Institute on Gender, Law, and Transformative Peace at CUNY Law. In person only. 

Friday, November 10, 2:00 pm:  Ivan Simic (Charles University, Prague) presents research on “Gender Policies Towards Muslim Men in Socialist Yugoslavia and Bulgaria”. Online only: Zoom registration link 

Friday, November 17, 12:30 pm: Jane Sugarman (Graduate Center, CUNY) presents new research on musical activism in post-war Kosova. Online only: Zoom registration link.

Friday, December 8, 12:30 pm: Nicholas Boston (Lehman College, CUNY) presents new research on “The Amorous Migrant: Polish Gay Men in the United Kingdom, 2004-2020“. This will be a hybrid event at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and online with this Zoom registration link.

The Gender and Transformation in CEEE Workshop is sponsored by the EU Studies Center. The CUNY REEES Kruzhok is co-sponsored by the EU Studies Center and the History PhD Program of the CUNY Graduate Center.

On Tuesday, September 12, at 4:00 pm, the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies and the Deutsches Haus at NYU host a presentation of the book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe by the renowned British historian Timothy Garton Ash. In his new book, Ash gives a unique account of the history of Europe since 1945, drawing on his extensive personal notes from 50 years of events witnessed, places visited, and historymakers encountered (from Margaret Thatcher to Vladimir Putin) to chart the rise and then faltering of the quest for a ‘Europe whole and free’.

In this lecture, Professor Garton Ash will extend the analysis in Homelands to offer an interpretation of how Europe progressed from the post-War period (famously analysed by Tony Judt) to what he calls the post-Wall period. And why it then regressed, in a ‘downward turn’ after 2008, culminating in Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 – beginning the largest war in Europe since 1945. What did Europe get right? Where did it go wrong? Why?

For in-person attendance, please RSVP here.

About the book:

Timothy Garton Ash, Europe’s “historian of the present,” has been “breathing Europe” for the last half century. In Homelands he embarks on a journey in time and space around the postwar continent, drawing on his own notes from many great events, giving vivid firsthand accounts of its leading actors, revisiting the places where its history was made, and recalling its triumphs and tragedies through their imprint on the present.

Garton Ash offers an account of events as seen from the ground—history illustrated by memoir. He describes how Europe emerged from wartime devastation to rebuild, to triumph with the fall of the Berlin Wall, to democratize and unite. And then to falter. It is a singular history of a period of unprecedented progress along with a clear-eyed account of how so much went wrong, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. From the pen of someone who, in spite of Brexit, emphatically describes himself as an English European, this is both a tour d’horizon and a tour de force.

About the author:

Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at the University of Oxford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His books include The Magic Lantern, his eyewitness account of the revolutions of 1989; The File: A Personal History, based on reading his own Stasi file; and History of the Present. He lives in Oxford, England.