CEMS is happy to announce that the Specialization in Eastern Mediterranean Studies (EMS) has been approved by the CEU senate

CEMS’s Specialization in Eastern Mediterranean Studies (EMS) has been approved by the CEU senate, and will run from the academic year of 2015-2016. MA-students in the Departments of History and Medieval Studies whose focus is on any topic related to the Eastern Mediterranean and who work with colleagues from CEMS are encouraged to participate!

Aim of the Specialization

The Roman empire and its successive heirs and/or rivals, the Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, and Ottoman empires covered a period of roughly 2,000 years of history. Students in Eastern Mediterranean Studies (EMS) will focus on continuing as well as competing tradition(s) connecting these empires and explore their manifold ramifications to the post-Ottoman present.

The specialization offers students an innovative diachronic approach, from late antiquity to the modern age, focusing on a geographical area at the crossroads of cultures and thereby unusually rich in its intellectual, social, institutional, and cultural heritage. At the same time, however, it encourages the synchronic—both comparative and connected—approaches to the imperial polities that lay claim to the Roman inheritance (or rivaled them). Just as the rise of the Roman-Byzantine imperial order was coterminous with the Sasanian and, later, with the rise of Islamic Caliphate as well as Eurasian Steppe Empires, the subsequent rise of the Ottoman Empire was likewise coterminous to the rise of the Habsburg, Safavid, Qajar and Russian empires – all of which fashioned themselves as universalist orders and claimed similar Roman-Byzantine traditions, institutions, and imperial trappings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the latter empires also fell apart at the same time, leaving successor nation states emerging in their wake to deal with the legacies of imperial ideas and policies—a process that lasts to this day.

By cutting through traditional chronological, geographical and disciplinary boundaries, EMS presents students with a unique opportunity to explore how various and successive traditions were appropriated by and adjusted to the realities of medieval, early modern and modern polities in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond.

Financial packages

Financial packages are available for students taking the specialization in EMS.

For more information visit: http://cems.ceu.edu/sems