070256 SE Seminar (2017W)

The seminar takes the 100th anniversary of Bolshevik Revolution as a point of departure to compare revolutions in modern European history. The focus will be on the causes and courses of the revolutions, their internal and external dynamics, major agents and ideological ingredients and outlooks. On a meta-level the seminar intends to compare the reception and the theories of revolutions. Special attention will be dedicated to the French Revolution, which coined the term and became a point of reference for all later revolutions, and the Bolshevik Revolution, its national and regional variants in the Russian Empire, and various national revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe. The seminar will also cover attempts to export the Bolshevik revolution to other countries, and its international reception, including the era after World War II. Finally, the seminar will analyze the liberal revolutions of 1989, their consequences for European history, and the most recent revolution in Ukraine in 2014.

The seminar is the part of our cooperation with the Department of History at the Central European University in Budapest. The course will be offered simultaneously at both universities with the participation of the corresponding instructor (at the CEU it will be Prof. Charles Shaw, a specialist on the history of the Soviet Union). The seminar will be summed up with a joint graduate student workshop in early or mid January, 2018, in which students will present and discuss draft term papers.