Welcome to the new academic year. On behalf of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), I am delighted to invite new and returning students, faculty, affiliates, and incoming visiting scholars to join our Center’s mission and tradition of building a vibrant intellectual community.
CES is Harvard’s hub for European Studies. For 56 years, our Center has supported interdisciplinary research and advanced the study of Europe. As the largest center of its kind in the United States, CES has mentored generations of students, built a transatlantic network of scholars of European studies, and sparked vital debates about Europe’s past, present, and future.
We begin this year amid tumultuous times for the United States, Europe, and the world. This makes our mission of research, teaching, and debate more important than ever. To meet the challenges of our time, we are launching one new initiative and continuing one we started last year.
The Forum: Europe in a Time of War will be a new collaboration between CES and Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Together with my colleagues at these centers, we will be hosting a series of lectures on themes connected to the ongoing war in Europe – a topic of shared interest. A schedule of The Forum’s events will be forthcoming soon.
Our Center-wide initiative Democracy and Its Critics will once again serve as a platform for events and research focused on today’s disruptions – rising polarization, strengthening radical right forces, increasing economic instability, and shifting demographics – common themes of interest to our scholars.
In our efforts to promote research, CES will continue to strengthen the study of Europe for students:
Graduate students will conduct their research in Europe through our dissertation fellowships and present their work in the dynamic Graduate Student Research Workshop led this year by our Graduate Student Affiliates Adrian Scheibler and Jonathan Zait.
Our Center’s vibrancy is sustained through our active seminars and lecture series led by our dedicated faculty and seminar chairs. Their efforts are foundational to our mission. I encourage you to keep updated with the CES events calendar to learn more about the full range of upcoming events and activities. For September, please mark your calendars for:
I look forward to continuing CES’s tradition of building community, solidarity, and intellectual vitality for our students, faculty, and scholars who share a deep interest in Europe. I would like to thank our many affiliates and students. I am grateful for your energy and contributions to our Center. To our newly arrived students and colleagues, I look forward to meeting you and hearing your ideas.
Please feel free to reach out to me and our Center’s Executive Director Elaine Papoulias with any questions or suggestions to further our new initiative or other ongoing work.
Daniel Ziblatt
CES Director & Eaton Professor of the Science of Government
