Comparative History Central European University (CEU)

Overview

Outline and Rationale of the Doctoral Program

• The particular - indeed unique - feature of the Comparative History program at Central European University (CEU)  is that it focuses on the comparison of four distinct geo-cultural regions: Central, Southeastern, and Eastern Europe, and the Eastern Mediterranean area, in close relation to the history of other historical regions, most notably with Western Europe and the Middle East.

• Comparative history is often preached and seldom practiced in advanced historical studies. When it finds its way onto the agenda of Ph.D. programs, the emphasis falls mainly on distinctive regional-national fields with no connecting tissue. 
• The doctoral program at CEU seeks to root the comparative dimension in the historical experience of the four distinct geo-cultural regions of Central, Southeastern and Eastern Europe, and the Eastern Mediterranean area. 

• We acknowledge that these regions are themselves constructions representing symbolic as well as physical and human geographies. But we endeavor to find the loci of these representations in both intra-regional and extra-regional perceptions. 

• We seek to avoid the dual methodological trap of seeing the region only from the outside as something "other" than the higher cultural level and material development of the West or alternatively only from the inside as a unique and therefore incomparable expression of indigenous factors. 
• In this way, the comparative program will come to grips with one of the abiding intellectual and methodological problems of writing the history of these regions: namely, the tension between "Westerners" or externals and nativists or internals, between the conflicting metaphors of orientalism and nationalism.