With the beginning of academic year 2010/11, CEU’s Center for Hellenic Traditions (2004/5–2009/10) appears in a new format. Reflecting the recent exciting growth of CEU faculty in the field of eastern Mediterranean studies, the center re-named itself the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies (CEMS). With a senior membership of seventeen drawn from a wide range of CEU teaching units, CEMS constitutes the university’s largest research center; it is the only one with a focus predominantly on the pre-modern to (early) modern periods.
CEMS promotes the study of the eastern Mediterranean and its hinterlands from antiquity, especially the Hellenistic oikoumene (323–30 BCE), to the end of the Ottoman period (1923 CE) in an internationally unique conguration; CEMS faculty is interconnected by common interest in themes such as: imperial legacies and (dis)continuities; ancient and medieval philosophical traditions and the cross-cultural transmission of knowledge; multi-religious societies; east-west interactions and economic and cultural exchanges (‘Mediterraneans’). Along these trajectories the center encourages the constant rethinking and provocative transgression of existing disciplinary, and established or perceived spatial/chronological, boundaries and classications, questioning transmitted orthodoxies and heterodoxies and actively working to privilege hitherto marginalized texts and sources.
CEMS welcomes application for membership from any CEU student with a research interest pertaining to the center’s geographical, chronological, and thematic scope.