New cooperation

The Graduate School for East and South Eastern European Studies (GSOSES) and the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) have reached an agreement to officially extend cooperation. Located at the University College London, SSEES is one of the oldest and world’s leading academic institutions for research and teaching on East and Southeast Europe. Like the GSOSES, it pursues the concept of interdisciplinary area studies.

Now, the University College London and the University of Regensburg have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to increase cooperation between SSEES and GSOSES. The cooperation agreement provides for a mutually beneficial doctoral exchange as well as the possibility of double supervision. It is also planned that SSEES and GSOSES will organize joint seminars or courses such as a summer school.

Professor Dr. Ulf Brunnbauer, Regensburg spokesman for the GSOSES, is pleased to announce the cooperation agreement, which he also considers politically important: “Especially in times of Brexit we want to strengthen academic cooperation with the U.K. – as a sign that the common European research area does not simply give way to populism”.

The Graduate School and the SSEES can already look back at a successful period of intensified exchange. Since 2015, literary scholar Dr. Peter Zusi has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Graduate School. Earlier he contributed to GSOSES’s first Annual Conference in 2014 with a paper reflecting on the paradigms of modern area studies.

Other SSEES members came for lectures to Munich and Regensburg, respectively. Sociologist Dr. Eric Gordy and political scientist Prof. Dr. Alena Ledeneva presented their research in GSOSES’s seminar series “Kolloqium”; cultural anthropologist Costanza Curro participated in the workshop “The Post- Socialist Street: Rising Car Mobility in Comparative Perspective“, which took place in Regensburg in October 2016. Moreover, Prof. Dr. Jan Kubik, Director of SSEES and Professor of Slavonic and East European Studies, visited Regensburg in February 2016, where he gave a lecture on "The Politics of Collective Memory in Post-communist Europe" in GSOSES’s public lecture series “Forum”.

This year, five members of the SSEES will attend and contribute to GSOSES’s Annual Conference on populism in Eastern Europe. It will take place in Regensburg from 1 to 3 June 2017.