Summer school at the University of Warsaw – “Globalizing the Local”

Globalizing the Local: Unexpected Global Connections between Eastern Europe and the World (University of Warsaw, September 2024)

Global history is one of the fastest growing disciplines in world historiography. It focuses not so much on the macro-historical approach which captures history in grand narratives, but on the search for non-obvious connections and comparisons between people, ideas and institutions in the changing world. The history of Eastern Europe is often analyzed from a national perspective, while its relationships with the rest of the world are relegated to a secondary position. The summer school ‘Globalizing the Local: Unexpected Global Connections between Eastern Europe and the World’ aims to bring the unexpected into the foreground by investigating the connections between the local and the global, providing students with informative lectures and methodological tools to enrich their knowledge and their research skills. Over the course of one week, the summer school will provide an introduction to the field of Global History. Students will have the opportunity to participate in lectures by international and national scholars specialized in global history, especially but not exclusively on Eastern Europe and its international connections in a historical perspective. The summer school will introduce MA students and third year BA students to the basic assumptions and methodological concepts of global history and show areas of dispute within this field as well as prospects for its further development. During the summer school, students will learn how to make use of global history methodology for their own work. This will be achieved by enriching student’s topics with comparative analyzes on a global scale, or by searching for connections between the subject of students’ research interests and phenomena from more or less distant areas. The workshop will result in the creation of research projects that will be presented and discussed during joint sessions with fellow students and faculty which will take place after the course.

We invite both MA students and third year BA students who wish to make use of Global History in their research to apply to the summer school. We welcome students interested in the Early Modern and Modern history of Poland, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The teaching staff will consist of both lecturers of the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw and specialists from other renowned European universities. The school will be free (accommodation free of charge is possible for non-resident students). The main language of instruction will be English. The students can expect to receive 4 ETCS for participation and 2 ETCS for their final paper.

Students who are interested in the school are asked to pre-apply writing an email to the address globalhistory@uw.edu.pl  by 25 March 2024.

Please include in the email:

• Your academic profile and your research interests
• Languages skills
• Title of your thesis (optional)
• Indication of the preferred time for the summer school to take place. Please choose between the following options:
  • 2-6 September 2024
  • 9-13 September 2024
  • 16-20 September 2024