The Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the European Studies Center jointly administer the Central European Studies Certificate targets students who are interested in exploring the specific experiences of Central European societies during the 19th and 20th centuries. This includes the formation and transformation of regional identifications in places of ethnic and religious diversity, myth-making and collective memory, migration and its effects on societies, democracy and authoritarianism, empires and nation-states, war and mass violence, Europe's Cold War division but also the peaceful revolutions of 1989. Central Europe is the lens to study many of the most important global processes of the last two centuries, such as imperialism and imperial expansion and competition, the emergence of the nation-states, nationalism and genocide, industrialization, democratization and economic transformation, migration and racism, multiculturalism and language diversity.
Central Europe is often marked as peripheral, but the region shows that it is was and is closely entangled with the wider world and shaped both European and global political, economic, social and cultural dynamics. Given that these processes play out in a great variety of forms – be it in politics, social movements, literature, art, architecture, or in music – the interdisciplinary nature of a certificate anchored in the area studies centers provides the appropriate intellectual and academic framework.