About

The Project

The Centre for Advanced Study (CAS), Sofia, and the New Europe College (NEC), Bucharest, promote outstanding individual research and groundbreaking knowledge in the social sciences and humanities by awarding in-residence Fellowships to excellent researchers. With their joint initiative “How To Teach Europe?” they introduced a special module to further the transfer of knowledge from first-rate research into teaching. Selected scholars and university professors from Southeastern Europe were motivated to develop their research topics further, having in view academic outreach and lending the state-of-the-art theories and methodologies in their disciplines a pan-European dimension.

The goal of the three-year program (2017–2019) was to improve the quality of higher education in the social sciences and humanities and to endorse its public relevance. A tangible output is the conceptualization of a series of new courses and the development of innovative curricula for the universities of the participating scholars and beyond.

What others have to say:

There is no good teaching without research, and the other way around – there is no good research without displaying one’s findings and hypotheses to a student audience. It is difficult but very important to translate research into clear teaching questions and demonstration, notably when the ambition is to deliver an interdisciplinary approach, to discuss up-to-date scholarly literature and research inquiries and methods, and to contribute to debates on “modernity”, identities and nationalism in contemporary Europe. How to avoid methodological nationalism and go beyond nation-centric historiography and, at the same time, account for the local specificities in (historical) developments are difficult yet key tasks. The members of the “How to Teach Europe” program have achieved this goal: innovating university curricula in line with ongoing scholarly reassessments of nation-centric historiography and public narratives.
Dr. Silvia MARTON New Europe College alumna and assistant professor, University of Bucharest, Political Science Department
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, European academic life is less unified than we could have hoped for. Selfishness in the West and structural problems in the East still prevent European higher education and research from functioning as a truly common resource. That is where an initiative such as the “Teaching Europe” program displays its scientific and scholarly potential: two research institutions from “peripheral” Europe have filled a unique, globally visible intellectual space at the very “centre” of our common culture and values.
Dr. Antonio LOPRIENO Professor of Egyptology and former Rector, University of Basel, President of the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, ALLEA
Europe as a political, cultural and economic structure will remain an abstract and intangible concept unless its value acquires a narrative or visual shape. Coordinated by the New Europe College in Bucharest and the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia, the “Teaching Europe” project has developed new concepts and innovative proposals that aspire to teach Europe in such a creative manner to students in the classroom. I very much welcome this initiative and am certain that this inspiring project will trigger similar endeavours in many other regions of Europe.
Dr. Ulrich Schmid Professor in Russian and East-European Studies at the University of St. Gallen

Andrei Cusco shares his experience under the project

Courses

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Andrei Cusco
Department of History and Geography, “Ion Creangă” State Pedagogical University, Chisinau
cuscophd@gmail.com

Violence, Population Politics, and Total War in the East European Borderlands: World War I and Its Aftermath

This course discusses the East European borderlands during and after World War I from a comparative, regional and pan-European perspective. It seeks to bridge the long-standing “East-West” divide that is still dominant in current curricula and to offer an integrated and entangled vision of European history during World War I and its aftermath.
MA Students 1 semester Modern History
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Nikolai Vukov
Department of Ethnology, Plovdiv University "Paisii Hilendarski"
nikolai.vukov@gmail.com

Communism as ‘Heritage’, Heritage as ‘Nostalgia’

The goal of the course is to introduce students to the various aspects of remembering and interpreting the communist period in Eastern Europe through the juxtaposition of the notions of heritage and nostalgia.
BA Students 2 semesters Anthropology
Free
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Volodymyr Kulikov
Department of Humanities, Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv
v.kulikov@ucu.edu

Industrial Enterprise and Society in Modern Eastern Europe

The course aims to discuss the main economic, social, technological, cultural, and political changes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern Europe through the prism of business organization and entrepreneurship.
BA and MA students 1 semester Economic History
Free
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Nadezhda Alexandrova
Department of Bulgarian Literature, Faculty of Slavic Studies, Sofia University
n.alexandrova@slav.uni-sofia.bg

Adventures with Emotions in Bulgarian Literature from the 18th and 19th Century

The aim of the course is to introduce students to a comparatively new field of study: history of emotions. Its scope includes research of the transfer of earlier ideas about emotions from Europe and the Mediterranean and investigation of the local adaptations of this transfer in Bulgarian culture of the 18th–19th centuries.
BA Students 40 hours Literary Studies
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Georgi Niagolov
Department of English and American Studies, Sofia University
georgeniagolov@gmail.com

Literary Elements / Learning Game

Literary Elements is a learning game designed to provide a safe and enjoyable platform for developing high reading competence through structured discussions of literary texts. When used in a formal learning environment, Literary Elements dismantles the inherent hierarchy between instructor and students, gives back the ownership of the reading process to the students, and challenges both instructor and students to compete by the same rules.
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Calin Cotoi
Department of Sociology, University of Bucharest
calincotoi@yahoo.com

The History of the Social: Social Laboratories and Networks of Reform in Central and Eastern Europe

The course seeks to offer a meaningful “history of the present”, a history of the social, focused on Central and Eastern Europe, but as part of a larger European comparative and transnational approach.
MA 1 semester sociology