'Languages for the 21st century: training, impact and influence' is a key conference designed to showcase new training provision, techniques, technologies, methodologies and research in language teaching.The conference is being held at the University of Sheffield, from September 1st-2nd 2010.

ASTON CENTRE FOR EUROPE (ACE) / CENTRE FOR EAST EUROPEAN LANGUAGE-BASED AREA STUDIES (CEELBAS) / SUSSEX EUROPEAN INSTITUTE (SEI)

Members of institutions from across the CEELBAS Research Network (UCL, Oxford, Birmingham, Bath, Cambridge, Kent, Manchester, Sheffield, Warwick and SOAS) are invited to submit applications for the final round of Network Funding to be allocated before the close of the Centre's initial five-year period of activity in September 2011.

On 25th June 2010 the University of Birmingham will host a one-day conference on ‘Party Politics in Russia’. The conference brings together many of the leading scholars on post-Soviet Russian politics in the UK and Ireland. Speakers include:

The second CEELBAS-funded workshop on the theme of international elites and identity formation in the post-Soviet space will take place at Cambridge University on June 11th 2010. Participation from scholars working in this area is invited. For more details, including a programme with links to abstacts of the papers, please visit the Events section of the website at:

Applications are inivited for a three-year MPhil/PhD UCL Impact Scholarship to conduct research on Russian legal cases in foreign courts under the supervision of Professor Alena Ledeneva at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, starting in September 2010.

Following a new strategic partnership between CEELBAS and The Russian Media House publishing company, the first in a projected series of articles covering the expertise of CEELBAS partners appeared in the UK Russian-language journal ‘New Style’ in January 2010 (issue 79). In this article Dr Maria Rubins of UCL School of Slavonic Studies presented her research on Russian Émigré Prose, discussing the various cultural-linguistic complexities faced by bilingual Russian émigré writers past and present, and their difficulties gaining recognition and acceptance whilst working within a foreign literary milieu. With particular reference to Russian émigré publications in interwar France, Dr Rubins described her work as an editor and publisher of these rare and often long out-of-print texts, highlighting the orthographic and technical challenges of such work. The original article (in Russian) is available here.

Papers are solicited for a conference on 'Diasporas and Cosmopolitanism in Central and Eastern Europe: From Theory to Practice' to be held at UCL School of Slavonic Studies in Setpember 2010. For full details, contacts, and deadlines please click here.

Event Report and photos now available here

The CEELBAS Network Project workshop on 'Methods of Memory Studies: Russia and Eastern Europe' held at the University of Cambridge in December 2008 has led to Project Leader Alexander Etkind submitting a successful bid to the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Joint Research Programme Call under the Cultural Dynamics: Inheritance and Identity theme.

INTERNATIONAL ELITES AND THE FORMATION OF POLITICAL IDENTITY IN POST SOVIET SPACE

Under the auspices of the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies (Ceelbas) a workshop will be organised at Cambridge University on 11 June 2010.

Following the completion of a CEELBAS Network Project run by Marta Jenkala and Christopher Moseley to investigate how the teaching and testing of East European and Slavonic languages at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) maps onto the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), a summary of the project and a report on its findings and conclusions is available here. Further project details can be found in the Research section of the website. A presentation of the findings of the project, to which participants from across the CEELBAS Network will be invited, is being planned for Spring 2010 and will be publicised here.

University of Oxford, 24-26 September 2009

Held under the aegis of the British-Czech-Slovak Historians’ Forum (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~bcsforum/index.html) this interdisciplinary worksop, part-funded by CEELBAS under its Network Projects scheme, attracted a total of about 60 participants to the History Faculty at Oxford with 18 half-hour papers by historians or academic specialists from six countries. A Conference Report is available here.

Following completion of a pioneering CEELBAS-funded language project to create materials to develop the language skills of heritage speakers of Polish, the ‘Polish for Foreigners’ online language course is now available at www.polishforforeigners.org.

The first of a series of workshops under the umbrella theme Situating Culture is taking place at the University of Warwick from December 12^th-13^th 2009.

RUSSIA ON EDGE: RECLAIMING THE PERIPHERY IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN CULTURE

Friday 11 to Saturday 12 December 2009

International Elites and the Formation of Political Identity in Post Soviet Space

The first of two CEELBAS-funded workshops designed to explore the relationships between the formation of national identity and the structure of domestic and foreign elites, and to discover the role of such elites in defining identity and citizenship, took place on Friday November 27^th at the University of Cambridge. The workshop outlined domestic and external influences on identity formation. Papers addressed the ways in which internationalization of economics and politics interact with domestic interests to shape national identity.

Following several successful UK workshops and trips to Russia, the Russian Archives Training scheme is organising a one week trip to Moscow for research students based in the UK and overseas, in order to introduce them to working in the principal historical, literary and cultural archives used by scholars of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. The scheme is funded by CEELBAS and CRCEES, after a highly successful four-year pilot funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ‘Collaborative Research Training Provision for Doctoral Students’ scheme.

A one-day international conference was held at the University of Oxford in June 2009 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the ‘bloodless’ democratic revolutions that spread from Poland’s Gdańsk shipyards across East-Central Europe. The conference was held under the patronage of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, with sponsorship from CEELBAS, the M. B. Grabowski Foundation, and support from St. Antony’s College. It was co-ordinated by Dr Robert Pyrah, the CEELBAS Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cultural Processes in East-Central Europe, with Filip Lachowski, President of the Oxford University Polish Society.

The postgraduate ethics workshop took place at SSEES on 23 September 2009. Its main aim was to bring together academics and postgraduate research students within REES to exchange ideas and experiences relating to ethical issues. This workshop was divided into three sessions, designed to address three key themes: ethics and statistical data; ethical issues arising during fieldwork and ethical issues in an era of institutional paranoia.

Spaces of Nationhood: Landscape and Identity after Communism

A letter emphasising the importance of interdisciplinarity across the social sciences and humanities was published in the Times Higher Education Supplement. The letter was written by CEELBAS Director Robin Aizlewood and signed by the Directors of all five Language Based Area Studies Centres.

Dr Felix Ciută (UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies) has been awarded an ESRC/SSRC Collaborative Visiting Fellowship at the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University, in the Spring term 2010. At SAIS, Felix will conduct research on his project "Lily-Pad Geopolitics: Strategic Representations of Romania in the Global War on Terror".

On 12 and 13 June 2009, the Wider Europe network held a seminar in Bratislava in collaboration with CEELBAS, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Slovak Foreign Policy Association and the Comenius University. The principal focus of the conference was the impact of the new Member States on the making of the European Union’s policy towards its eastern neighbours and, in particular, their preferences for the Eastern Partnership.

The Centre is organising, across its Network, regular thematic and/or (inter-)disciplinary workshops including participation by international scholars and non-area specialists to take forward the research agenda. Please see CEELBAS network projects for further information.