Press Room

New call – VISEGRAD SCHOLARSHIP AT OSA! Research theme within the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA in 2021/22 Possibilities of knowing: Truth-seeking in a polarized world and [in] its aftermath We are happy to announce the call for the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA in 2021/22! Submission deadline: November 15, 2021 Who can apply? We invite applicants from the fields of history, the arts, philosophy, and sociology, to reflect on the conditions of knowledge production during and after the Cold War. Scholars, artists, journalists, and filmmakers are invited to analyze the documentary practices of different agencies and persons on both sides of the Iron Curtain and assess the truth value of related documents/artifacts. The call wishes to promote exchanges among people with backgrounds in arts, humanities, and social sciences.

The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (Blinken OSA) at Central European University organizes a seminar on fearless speech. This seminar is part of a longer event series on fearless speech co-organized by Blinken OSA and the students and lecturers of Freeszfe. The seminar will start at the beginning of October and is open to all Hungarian university and college students, including Freeszfe. Location: Blinken OSA, Arany János u. 32., 1051 Budapest, Hungary Maximum number of participants: 15 Application requirement: university student status Application deadline: October 6, 2021 The seminar is led by István Rév and András Mink. Details and application (in Hungarian)

On September 24, 2021, Blinken OSA hosted the Swedish Academy member, prominent writer and former investigative journalist Ingrid Carlberg, who was staying in Budapest at the invitation of the Swedish Embassy. Guests also included Katarina Szécsi Åsbrink (Counsellor, Deputy Head of Mission), Andreas Attorps (Economic Policy and Trade Officer), and László Upor (former Rector-Elect of SZFE, currently the member of the Freeszfe Association).

Research theme within the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA in 2021/22 Possibilities of Knowing: Truth Seeking in a Polarized World and [in] its Aftermath Another half-year has passed, and now we are happy to announce a new round of Visegrad Scholarship candidates who will soon begin their research at Blinken OSA. The evaluation of the last submitted Visegrad Scholarship applications has finished and the final list of winners with full support and partial support has been approved by the Council of Ambassadors. This scholarship call invited applicants from the fields of history, the arts, philosophy, and sociology. They are expected to reflect on the conditions of knowledge production during and after the Cold War, and expose the intellectual and professional practices (journalistic, sociological, artistic, political, archival) that both reflected and shaped the meaning and scope of the Cold War phenomenon. Visegrad Scholarship @ OSA – July 2021

This weekend the festival of the Budapest buildings continues with houses built or redesigned in 1921–1930 and 1945–1957. Budapest100 is a spring weekend festival celebrating the buildings and people around us. The event was launched in 2011 by Blinken OSA and the KÉK Contemporary Architecture Centre to celebrate the 100-year-old houses of the city. This year, due to the pandemic, the festival has been postponed to September. For detailed information: http://budapest100.hu/en/

Sergey Kovalev began his career as a biophysicist and was a top leading scientist, before he became one of the most famous human rights defenders in the former USSR. In the late 1960s, he was fired from his position for setting up the Action Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR in 1969. He regularly published in the samizdat publication titled Chronicle of Current Events, writing about labor camps or the arrests and psychiatric confinements of the opponents of the regime. In 1974, he was accused of spreading “anti-Soviet propaganda,” was arrested and sentenced to seven years in the Gulag, followed by three years of internal exile in the far-east and Kolyma. The reforms by Mikhael Gorbachev allowed him to return to Moscow in 1987. During perestroika, he resumed his activism, and participated in the founding of several key humanitarian organizations and initiatives, among them Memorial, a human rights society dedicated to the memory and rehabilitation of victims of political repression in the USSR.

This summer, Blinken OSA launched a major mass-digitization project with the aim to make paper/text-based materials available online.   This digitization project is an important step in the Archives’s ongoing digitization strategy, producing publicly available online collections for the subpages of the Blinken OSA website Digital Repository and Curated Collections. In the first phase of this digitization project, over 300,000 pages of new documents documents from 10 archival series will be uploaded to the Research Cloud. The Research Cloud is a tool to help access materials online, as well as an online repository for copies produced in the frame of our digitization-on-demand service. The materials available in the Research Cloud are accessible for CEU faculty and students, but researchers and interested parties can be granted access to selected collections on an individual basis.

In an era when printed encyclopedias are no longer the epitome of contemporary knowledge sources, a new online encyclopedic system was created.Nowadays the most well-known online encyclopedia, launched in 2001, is Wikipedia. It is a unique and complex online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by volunteer contributors, furthermore, it is multilingual, free, and easily accessible. For an institution like Blinken OSA, to be present on Wikipedia is a must and to ensure this professional presence and to train possible future Wikipedia editors, Ádám Harangozó, a Wikimedian in residence was invited.

Visegrad Call – 2021 Spring NEW CALL - VISEGRAD SCHOLARSHIP! Research theme within the Visegrad Scholarship at the Blinken OSA in 2021/22 Possibilities of knowing: Truth seeking in a polarized world and [in] its aftermath We are happy to announce the next call for the Visegrad Scholarship at the Blinken OSA in 2021/22! Submission deadline: July 25, 2021 For detailed information of the call, recommended research questions and topics, please check the official Blinken OSA Visegrad Scholarship webpage.  

On the initiative of the creator, collector, and donor of records pertaining to the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at Central European University (Blinken OSA) digitized over 8,000 pages of documents from David Rohde’s research collection, which will be donated to the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.

On the occasion of the 26th Budapest Pride Verzió brings you the latest documentary of Mari Takács. (no English subtitles are available, the film is available on-site and online as well) IN PERSON at Blinken OSA Archives Date: July 7, 2021 Time: at 6:00 p.m. Venue:  Budapest 1051, Arany János u. 32. The screening is followed by a discussion with the director and the two Hungarian protagonists, Csaba Hegedüs and Benjamin Forest Török as well as Dr. Miklós Fischer sport psychologist. Moderator: Flóra Dóra Csatári, journalist, telex.hu Please note that the number of seats is limited. Entry is free of charge but your Hungarian immunity card and an ID card/passport must be presented before entry. Pre-registration is required at this link: https://forms.gle/LVHDtm3TDewj1Uym8

Blinken OSA is happy to announce that the 2020 Annual Report has been released in digital format. The Annual Report gives an in-depth view of the diverse activities of the Archives. Year 2020 was marked by a tragic worldwide pandemic that fundamentally changed the way the Archives could operate. Contrary to the many challenges, significant archival processing work was done, the teaching activities of our colleagues continued online, exhibitions were opened both on-site and online, new acquisitions arrived, films were screened, new curated collections became available, school programs were reorganized online, and colleagues pursued their academic activities in the form of online conferences, workshops, and publications.

Colleagues participate in a week-long training program as volunteer instructors for the Potočari Memorial Center. June 9 is International Archives Day adopted by the International Council on Archives  (ICA ) at the International Congress in Vienna in 2004. ICA strongly believes that “Archives and archivists play an important role in accountability, transparency, democracy, heritage, memory, and society.” This is the day to celebrate archives and the Blinken OSA joins in the celebration by offering support to the Potočari Memorial Center in the form of professional training. Csaba Szilágyi, acting Chief Archivist of the Blinken OSA Archives has written a powerful blog post, titled Discussion About the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide Begins in the Archives. In the closing paragraph of the article he writes “Since December 2019, on behalf Blinken OSA, I serve as a pro bono archives consultant for the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery, assisting in designing and establishing a proper and long-needed archive and research center on the study of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. Digital copies of some of the records listed above will be transferred to the PMC Archives.” This ongoing consultancy work is now complemented by a week-long archival training program designed and carried out by the professional staff of the Blinken OSA, who will act as volunteer instructors during the online training. The training covers a wide range of topics that serve as the base for professional archival operation in a digital—and very much changed archival climate.

The Budapest Week was the first independent English-language weekly in Hungary, founded in March, 1991, by Rick Bruner, Steve Carlson, Richard W. Bruner, Tibor Szendrei, and Blake Steinberg. Peter Freed financed the paper from 1992, and remained its owner until the Budapest Week ceased printing around 2000. Thirty years have passed, and the founders of the Budapest Week contacted the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives to launch a common project, and to help to digitize, process, and host the first four years of the Budapest Week, with the aim of preserving and celebrating the legacy of this newspaper. Further steps were taken to gain permission for its online publication from the legal copyright holder Peter Freed, who was willing to help. The Blinken OSA and two of the founders, Steven Carlson and Tibor Szendrei, partnered up to look for documents, testimonies, interviews relating to the early years of the paper, as well as the photo documentation of those years. We are happy to announce that forty-three paper boxes of photos have been deposited at the Archives by Peter Freed. Thematically arranged, the photo archives of the Budapest Week also represents the turbulent but promising years after the regime change in Hungary, thus serving as a rich documentation for the researchers of the time.