After a pandemic-ridden last year, faculty members and archivists at Blinken OSA have begun the new academic year with fresh ambitions, offering a new palette of academic courses to CEU students.
At the beginning of each academic year, the university organizes Orientation Sessions for students. This year, it was held online due to COVID restrictions, but still gave us a chance to showcase a glimpse of our activities and inform the students about the on-site and distance research possibilities at the Archives. The Orientation Sessions were followed by individual course presentations by lecturers from Blinken OSA, who offer the following courses:
History in the Visual Mode: Methods and Practices of Documentary Storytelling
Oksana Sarkisova (Blinken OSA), Jeremy Braverman (CEU), US 2credits, ECTS 4 credits, MA – Department of History
The course focuses on representations of contested historical events in documentary cinema, and combines theoretical and practical approaches. It introduces students to the basics of analyzing and producing moving images that use historical arguments and explore the relationship between memory and public spaces. The theoretical part of the course surveys classical and experimental documentary films, and addresses mechanisms of constructing historical narratives by visual means.
The Power of Archival Thinking: Documents that Change / Challenged the World
Ioana Macrea-Toma (Blinken OSA), US 1 credit, ECTS 2 credits, MA – Department of History
This course investigates the genealogies of archives’ powers from their inception as state-building projects to their metamorphosis into counter-sites of opposing authoritarian power and politics. The course does not offer a panoramic overview of different archival institutions or paradigms, but rather analyzes—through certain key case studies ranging from 19th-century archives to secret police, counterinsurgency, colonial and identity archives—the changing interactions between influential documentary practices, (counter-)state politics, and history writing.