Selected Alumni Profiles

Yulia Karpova (MA 2009, PhD 2015) is a historian of Soviet and European art and design. In 2016-2018 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. Later she worked as a visiting lecturer at CEU and as an assistant archivist at Open Society Archives. Her book, Comradely Objects: Design and Material Cculture in Soviet Russia, 1960s–80s, was published by Manchester University Press in 2020.

Adrian Grama (PhD 2017) is Principal Investigator of the DFG funded project “Dominant Fictions” at the Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung in Regensburg, Germany. His first book was a social history of metalworkers and miners in postwar Romania.

Gábor Kármán (MA 2003 and PhD 2010) is a senior research fellow at the Research Center for the Humanities (until recently of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Institute of History since 2013. He currently leads an ERC Consolidator Grant on the shared qualities observable in the diplomacy of individual small states situated on the border between the Ottoman Empire and Christianity in the 16th to 18th centuries. After CEU, he spent six years at the Research Center for the History and Culture of East Central Europe (GWZO) i

Anastasia Felcher is an archivist responsible for the Slavic Collection at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives of the CEU. She completed her MA at the CEU (2010) and her PhD at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca (2016). She is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled Jewish Cultural Heritage post-1989. Debates on Memory and Preservation in Eastern Europe.

Kateryna Pasichnyk is a PhD Candidate of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. The focus of her current research is on the transformation of values in the eighteenth-century medical community of the Russian Empire and their manifestations within physicians’ activities and interactions with each other and laymen. 

"What I like about CEU: considerable support throughout each step of one's academic journey as well as a life-long feeling of belonging to the CEU community."

I graduated from CEU’s 2-year MA program in Comparative History in 2017 with an advanced certificate in Religious Studies. My time at CEU had a profound influence on my work, both by encouraging intensive academic rigor, and in shaping my historical perspective. I am now a PhD student in the University of Minnesota’s History Department where I work with their Center for Austrian Studies researching the impacts of propagandistic media on historical memory.

Irnya Vushko is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. She completed her MA at CEU and her PhD at Yale University (2008). Her book, The Politics of Cultural Retreat: Imperial Bureaucracy in Austrian Galicia, 1772-1867, appeared in 2015 with Yale University Press.

Roxana Maria Aras (MA, CEU 2015; currently PhD student in the Anthro-History Department at the University of Michigan). 

Alexander M. Semyonov (MA '98, Ph.D. '06) is currently Professor and Chair, of the Department of History of National Research University-Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg.

Olha Martynyuk (MA in 2010) is currently a Senior Lecturer at the National Technical University "Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute". In this same academic institution she has finished a doctoral program and defended her dissertation in February 2017. She has been a fellow researcher at the Institute for Human Studies (Vienna, 2011-2012), the German Historical Institute in Moscow (2013, 2014) and University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Fulbright program, 2018-2019).

Teodora Shek Brnardić (PhD 2004), currently Senior Research Fellow at the Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb. 

Jian Zhang (MA in Comparative History, CEU 2015, Ph.D. student at the Department of History, University of Michigan)

Ferenc Laczó (PhD 2011), currently assistant professor in modern and contemporary European history at Maastricht University, formerly lecturer in the same function (2015 to 2016), before that researcher at the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena (2010 to 2015).​

Ievgeniia Sakal (MA CEU 2012, currently at Yale University for a PhD in History). My year as an MA student at Central European University was certainly unforgettable. Because my scholarly interests were at a crossroads of early-modern intellectual and Eastern European religious history, my case was approached individually.  I could take classes both from the History and Medieval Studies departments and I was also enrolled in the Religious Studies Program. Thus, I benefited from a whole range of subjects that corresponded perfectly with my scholarly interests.

Marius Turda completed his doctoral studies at CEU in 2002. He is currently an associate professor in the Faculty of History, Philosophy and Religion at Oxford Brookes University and Director of its Centre for Medical Humanities. He was founding director of the Cantemir Institute at the University of Oxford (2012-13). He also founded the Working Group on the History of Race and Eugenics (HRE) in 2006 at Oxford Brookes University and he coordinates the book series CEU Studies in the History of Medicine.

Ana Sekulic (MA 2013; since 2013 PhD Student, Princeton University). After finishing my BA at Wesleyan University, I enrolled in the one-year MA at CEU's Department of History. I chose CEU because of the excellent reputation of the program and its faculty members.

Máté Rigó (MA 2009, Assistant Professor, Yale NUS college). "CEU has one of the strongest concentrations of scholars working on East-Central Europe within Anglo-American academia, and as I was committed to study the history of the region I decided to apply. My year as an M.A. student at the CEU History Department enabled me to achieve a thorough grounding in regional historiography, and become familiar with multiple perspectives, theories and methods of writing history, ranging from intellectual, urban and cultural history.

Bojan Aleksov received his PhD at CEU and is now associate professor at University College London School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies. Prior to his current position, he was a Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin and a Max Weber Fellow at European University Institute in Florence, Italy.