Teaching
The Blinken OSA Archivum offers undergraduate and postgraduate academic courses and specializations to Central European University (CEU) students, and for CEU’s annual Summer University (SUN).
Our courses in the 2024/25 academic year
Encountering Facts in the Archive: Historical method, Theory, and Archival Work
CEU, History Department
Instructors: Ioana Macrea-Toma, Andras Mink
This seminar proposes an investigation into the history and methodologies of dealing with “facts” from the combined perspectives of historiography, history of science, journalism, and theories of the archive. It offers brief introductions into the history of archives from the point of view of their different representations of facts within contexts (from state archives to activist counter-archives), and it discusses main texts that dealt with the genealogy of facts or made a plea for factuality. It debates certain key cases studies taken from the contested history of the Cold War, Holocaust, or colonial history, thus offering a hands-on approach to analyzing facts within opposed narratives and within different media (paper sources or digital sources).
Archives, Evidence and Human Rights
CEU, Legal Studies - cross-listed with MA in Human Rights, MA in Central European History, MA in Comparative History
Instructors: Iván Székely, András Mink, Márk László-Herbert, József Gábor Bóné
This course aims at looking at the roles and uses of human rights documentation in the context of memory and oblivion, social in/justice, access to and protection of archival documents, use of digital open source information on human rights violations, the archival heritage of dissident movements, and the history of human rights. Establishing facts by forensic methods, producing impeccable evidence to convict perpetrators, or understanding the roots of conflicts and working toward dialog and reconciliation are just a few areas where the availability of reliable records and archival activism can make a huge difference. In addition to attending classes and workshops, students can do individual research at Blinken OSA Archivum in Budapest.
Archival Practice
CEU, Department of History
Instructors: Blinken OSA Archivum Staff
Spring Term AY 2024/2025
The Archival Practice includes supervised practice in the Archivum’s professional activities. Students will spend 30 hours in Budapest to familiarize themselves with the various stages of the archival workflow and the “invisible” processes of creating archives. It is conceived as a guided individual discovery of Blinken OSA Archivum under the supervision of assigned staff members. Embedded in contemporary archival theory, the journey will cover, among others, analog and digital sources, textual processing and the AV studio, and archival databases and descriptive methods and electronic catalogs. The full program of the Archival Practice will be available soon.
The condition for pursuing the archival specialization (max. five students) is the successful completion of the AEHR course. However, the course can be taken without necessarily opting for the archival specialization. The Archival Practice is also available as a stand-alone archival training course for a limited number of students (max. five) university wise.
The Archives and Evidentiary Practices Specialization comprises the AEHR course and the Archival Practice course.
History in the Visual Mode: Methods and Practices of Documentary Storytelling
CEU, Department of Historical Studies; Visual Studies Platform
Instructors: Oksana Sarkisova, Adam Hushegyi
The course focuses on representations of contested historical events in documentary cinema and combines theoretical and practical approaches. It introduces students to the basics of analyzing and producing moving images that use historical arguments and explore relationship between memory and public spaces. Theoretical part of the course surveys classical and experimental documentary films and addresses mechanisms of constructing historical narratives by visual means. During class discussions we will analyze the use of first-person testimonies, found footage, and the role of editing and sound design in documentary films as means of storytelling. In the practical component of the course students will learn the basics of camera work and editing and will do group exercises to develop their visual skills. The students will learn to film interviews, work with archival footage, and shoot observational scenes. Working on practical assignments, students are introduced to the basics of project development and organization, learn camera basics and basic post-production techniques. The course aims to develop analytical, rhetorical, visual, as well as a range of practical skills, including collaboration and communication skills. The course introduces students to the basics of visual literacy and develops their critical thinking and ability to design interdisciplinary research projects.
Erasure – The City in the Archive (and vice versa)
CEU, History in the Public Sphere program
Program director: István Rév
Through a series of lectures, site visits, seminars, and masterclasses, the students acquire a critical toolkit that allows them to deal with memory politics and historical (re)interpretations in the public sphere, from the urban landscape to archival corpora. The city of Budapest provides the opportunity for a concrete exploration of political strategies of deception belonging to the dictatorial regimes of the 20th century up to the populist autocracy of the current times. The Archives serves as a “source” documenting sensitive topical issues; in a broader, heuristic sense, it was the laboratory where analogous issues related to the relationship between documents/traces, representations, and historical phenomena were analyzed.
Representation of Roma in Hungarian films
Instructors: Zsuzsa Debre, Vera Szabari (ELTE), Zsuzsa Zádori, Judit Hegedüs
Eötvös Loránd Science University, Sociology
The aim of this course is to provide students with a deeper knowledge of the social situation of Roma in Hungary and to enable them to carry out a sociological analysis of films depicting social groups. During the course, students will explore sociological approaches and previous research, and then analyze different films featuring Roma characters. Students will choose a narrow theme to develop based on literature and film analysis. The course material will draw on relevant collections of the Archivum.
CEU courses
The Archivum's teaching staff have been fully directing or co-teaching mandatory historiography courses or seminars on the uses of archives, history writing, and legal issues. The courses address broad themes concerning the historian’s craft, truth, and objectivity, documentary works, or evidentiary, legal, cinematic and critical archival practices related to human rights. The Archivum's collections related to the Cold War and post-1989 transitions, as well as history of human rights movements and violations usually serve as the documentary infrastructure of the seminars, but also as subjects on their own, whose histories are relevant for the understanding of the political, socio-economic and scientific production of information and knowledge. Our courses therefore are immersive, experimental, and laboratory-like, combining multimedia resources with hands-on archival exercises.
SUN Courses
Our SUN (CEU Summer University) courses have so far been conceived around access to information and archives, as well as managing, automating, and accessing modern archives, and the challenges posed by electronic records and digital documents. Recent SUN courses have also addressed the issue of expertise, its historical roots and current challenges, where the Blinken OSA Archivum Cold War collections featured as the knowledge touchstone of Cold War scholarship and policy-making.
Partnerships
We provide introductory sessions on information retrieval and practical examination of sources from its archival holdings, and Research Data Management consultation services for CEU students.
From the onset, the Archivum has also collaborated with the Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU), a certificate program for junior and senior undergraduate students from Ukraine launched by CEU in May 2022. István Rév and Oksana Sarkisova are further invited as guest lecturers within the History track and Culture/Heritage track, and Anastasia Felcher is involved in mentoring students from the Culture/Heritage track.
In 2023, the Archivum organized an archival internship program to selected high-school students of the Milestone Institute. The program, led by Judit Hegedüs, guided the participants through the various stages of the archival work, and offered them the opportunity to practice their newly acquired and honed archivist skills under supervision.
