Centre for Russian, Central and East European Studies (CRCEES)

11/11/2025

Sign and share the petition Petition · Stop the removal of Modern Languages courses at the University of Nottingham! - United Kingdom · Change.org
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The University of Nottingham has suspended applications to all languages degree programmes (including Russian and Serbian/Croatian), with a view to their permanent closure. Under the proposals, it will not be possible to study any modern language to degree level at the University of Nottingham, or anywhere in the East Midlands.

Languages matter for the UK’s economy, society, and security. See The economic value to the UK of speaking other languages (2022) and the British Academy’s 2016 Born Global report.

If these degrees are lost, the entire East Midlands region will be a ‘cold spot’. The region already ranks high in terms of educational deprivation – this decision will make that deprivation worse:
The pipeline for language teachers in the region will be affected, making it even more difficult to maintain language teaching in schools and limiting local pupils’ opportunities, further disadvantaging them compared to others nationally. There will be no language degrees available to students who prefer to study locally, undermining the University’s local and regional civic mission and at odds with the University’s own Civic Strategic Delivery Plan.

The University of Nottingham presents itself as Britain’s global university. The university’s Strategy promises a vision “to be a university without borders”, to “solve problems and improve lives … through application to local and global challenges”. Without any modern languages degrees, the University instead shows a narrow vision and inability to embrace other languages and cultures.

Cutting degree-level languages provision jeopardises expertise in many other disciplines too, including history, philosophy, literature, business, and law, which depend on high-level language skills and in-depth cultural knowledge. For example, many of Nottingham’s own leading historians rely on their advanced language skills to study the history across the globe (in Chinese, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese …). No languages, and you lose most of global history too, also philosophy, literature, as well as access to and appreciation of crucial trading partners and their ways of doing business.

Cutting language degrees would make Nottingham the only Russell Group (research-intensive) University with no languages in its Arts and Humanities and would damage its reputation and standing.

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20/10/2025

Infrastructures for a (Dis)Connected World: Polarities Network+ 2025/26 calls

As part of the UKRI-funded Network + Shifting Global Polarities: Russia, China, and Eurasia in Transition, which includes the University of Glasgow alongside colleagues in Birmingham, Oxford and Manchester, we are pleased to announce this year's round of funded opportunities made available by the network.

Calls are open for:
- Up to 10 Research Projects to enable original research, policy analysis, and synthesis of knowledge
- Up to 8 research fellowships
- Up to 4 Art fellowships
- The annual Polarities Network workshop, to be held in Glasgow in early June 2026, which this year will focus on Infrastructures for a (Dis)Connected World

Deadlines for submission are specified in the calls for each activity, which can be found at https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/projects/network-plus-shifting-global-polarities.

We would be grateful if you could please disseminate this notice through your professional network.

05/09/2025

CEES' Vladimir Unkovski-Korica has co-curated an online exhibition "Factories to the Workers?" to commemorate 75 years since the birth of Yugoslav self-management. Check out more at: https://fabrikeradnicima.com/ and attend one of his presentations across the ex-YU!

Izložba posvećena istoriji jugoslovenskog radničkog samoupravljanja povodom 75 godina od njegovog uvođenja. Arhivska grada i kritički uvidi otkrivaju složenost ovog sistema i njegovo nasleđe.

16/02/2025

CEES at the University of Glasgow is hiring again! Deadline for applications, 3 March 2025.

University of Glasgow
College of Social Sciences
School of Social & Political Sciences

Lecturer in Eurasian Studies
Vacancy Ref: 164611
Salary: Grade 7, £40,247 - £45,163 per annum

This post is full-time (35 hours per week) and is offered fixed term for up to 4-years.

The School of Social & Political Sciences seeks to appoint a Lecturer in Eurasian Studies at Grade 7, with specific expertise in one or more countries of the post-socialist Eurasian region. The successful candidate will contribute to the delivery of an excellent student experience by contributing to teaching, assessment and administration processes associated with undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and to undertake scholarship to enhance learning and teaching within the subject area of Central and East European Studies (CEES).

The ideal candidate will have area expertise and advanced language skills in one or more of the post-socialist countries located in Central Asia [Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan] or the Caucasus [Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia]. We are particularly interested in applicants who have teaching agendas and research interests in the relationships that the People’s Republic of China has established with countries in one or both of these regional areas. Applicants with Russia-expertise or Ukraine-expertise with some experience on Eurasia may apply.

For informal enquiries, please contact Professor Clare McManus ([email protected]).
Visit our website for further information on the University of Glasgow’s, School of Social Sciences, please visit https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/
For more information and to apply online:

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19/12/2024

CALL FOR PAPERS, DEADLINE 17 JANUARY 2025:

'Culture, Media, and Resistance in a Polarising World'
Manchester University, 30 June-1 July 2025

First workshop under the UKRI Network Plus initiative ‘Shifting Global Polarities: China, Russia, and Eurasia in Transition’

Please share widely within your networks!

19/12/2024

We are excited to announce the first Call for Fellowships under the UKRI Network Plus ‘Shifting Global Polarities: Russia, China, and Eurasia in Transition’ Initiative of which we form part.

Application deadline 13 January 2025.

Please share widely within your networks!

Full details here: https://gla-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/david_smith_glasgow_ac_uk/EfHXXPzyAq5GphDwhHv-8HkBcJumC6yiTUWG1NCcDBqacQ?e=KxDsYB

Application form here: https://gla-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/david_smith_glasgow_ac_uk/ETFjm3aHZ_RFrAPfR-GtXEkB9kg1FdUFSfUVuGjA2Jk4-w?e=ysEz3T

19/12/2024

We are excited to announce the first Call for Research Project Funding under the UKRI Network Plus ‘Shifting Global Polarities: Russia, China, and Eurasia in Transition’ Initiative of which we form part. Application deadline 13 January 2025.

Please share widely within your networks!

Full details here: https://gla-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/david_smith_glasgow_ac_uk/EZEHFGFsg3ZJhbjYX4SyY8ABfv4EwBIRe36TGIkWD_C2Pg?e=5Jy3p1

Application form here:
https://gla-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/david_smith_glasgow_ac_uk/EavbeqwOGNVFr0Zm41ex8w8Bv4Y7kt0c2Ywly6po6_nfYQ?e=OKGRzS

30/07/2024

We are delighted to be part of the new UKRI Network Plus on Shifting Global Polarities: Russia, China and Eurasia in Transition, which has been awarded £5million over 2024-2028 to further understanding of a region spanning & . Stand by for lots more announcements and new opportunities to come! Further details here 👇
https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_1094383_en.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawEVkWtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHYkikAI37Ls03Tv_j7cZwh1J0VzgALWE834s94wAC01M80h-GapQJ30vbQ_aem_iOWCo6hyWU25K98urPdoLw

02/07/2024

Details of a forthcoming event where CEES' Vladimir Unkovski-Korica will present the keynote address!

Join our workshop on of East & Southeast Europe. An examination of the role of business in the economic & social development of the region. In cooperation with Institut ekonomskih nauka - Institute of Economic Sciences.
🗓️ 5 July | 8:30 CET | Belgrade & Online
➡️ https://leibniz-ios.de/en/events/detail/business-history

21/03/2024

PhD funding opportunity! Applications invited for the Scholarship at . Deadline 17 May. Theme: "Russia’s construction of the ‘other’: implications for ontological (in)security". Details here:

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27/11/2023

You are warmly invited to the next Central and East European Studies Seminar, on Wednesday 29 November, 4-5:30 pm, Room 337, St Andrews Building, University of Glasgow.

Robert Austin, University of Toronto
Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania's First and Last King

King Zog, Albania’s only homegrown king, picked up where others left off in continuing a cycle of political murder—one that almost caught up with him in Vienna in 1931. Luckily for him, but not his opponents, he survived. Afterward, Zog was more determined than ever to eliminate those who had opposed him, making murders and suicides a regular feature of Albania’s twentieth century.
Historian Robert Austin presents his forthcoming book, Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania's First and Last King (CEU Press, March 2024), which combines Zog’s adventurous life story with a studious analysis of Albania's political history from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the threshold of Euro-Atlantic integration.

About the speaker: Robert C. Austin is a historian of East Central and Southeastern Europe. He is Professor at the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CERES), which he co-directs, at the U of Toronto. In the past, Robert Austin was a Tirana-based correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; a Slovak-based correspondent with The Economist Group of Publications; and a news writer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto. He obtained a PhD in History from the University of Toronto and went on to publish numerous books, including A History of Central Europe (Palgrave, 2021), Making and Remaking the Balkans: Nations and States since 1878 (U of Toronto Press, 2019). He has recently completed a book on King Zog, and is co-writing a biography of the Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha. In 2023, he was Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.

01/10/2023

You are warmly invited to the first CEES/CRCEES Seminar of the winter semester on Friday 6th October, 4 to 5:30 pm. room 706, Adam Smith Building (in-person only). All welcome!

Dr Shamil Khairov, University of Glasgow, CEES
Tatars in Mordovia – a minority in a national autonomous republic. Origin, Self-identity and Daily Life

There are about 7,000,000 Tatars in the world. Genetically, the three main groups that form the Tatar nation – the Volga Tatars, Siberian Tatars and Crimean Tatars – apparently do not share a close common ancestor.
The Mishar Tatars are the second largest subgroup of the Volga Tatars (after the Kazan Tatars). They populate the Western side of the Volga.
My family originates from Mishar Tatars in Mordovia, one of the national republics within Russia, where Moksha and Erzya Mordvins and ethnic Russians make up the majority. Today about 55,000 Tatars ( about 8% of the republic’s population ) live in Mordovia. For centuries, Tatars coexisted on these lands with these three ethnic groups, but until the 1980s interethnic marriages were very rare.
Since mass collectivization, starting in the 1930s the core enterprise in the village from where my parents come from was collective farming (kolkhoz), but the wages were very low and the younger generation sought jobs in Saransk, the republic's capital, or migrated to Moscow and other big cities. Although Tatar was abandoned as a language of instruction in the local school in the 1970s, up until the 1980s, the only language spoken in the village was Tatar. However, due to mass migration from the countryside to big cities during the Soviet period, the children of working migrants grew up in Russian-speaking environments and became bilingual or even lost their Tatar language (and identity).
Tatars in Mordovia are Sunni Muslims. They celebrate the main Muslim holidays, respect the elderly, and have regular gatherings with meals and prayers for the dead. But they also do not mind having parties with alcohol, dancing and singing Tatar, Russian and Soviet songs.
The paper is illustrated by numerous photographs from my trips to the village in 2010 and 2018 when I spoke with my relatives living there permanently or visiting it during their summer holidays from Saransk, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Shamil Khairov is a lecturer in Russian at the University of Glasgow. He has given lectures on Russian visual culture and photography in Belgium, The Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Poland, and Slovakia.
Solo exhibitions: Quiet Russia, Edinburgh, Scotland (2009); The Colours of Silence / Barvy ticha,Ostrava, The Czech Republic (2012); Simple Things / Einfache Dinge, Germersheim, Germany (2013); Beyond the Seven Rivers / Za Siedmoma Rzekami , Warsaw, Poland (2014); Letters from Russia, Leuven, Belgium (2016), Returns / Возвращения, Petrozavodsk, Russia (with Alexei Savkin, 2019).
The CEES Seminar Series is kindly supported by the Macfie Bequest.