Press Room

PUBLIC TALK at Blinken OSA    May 12, 2022, at 6:00 p.m.    Blinken OSA, Budapest, 1051 Arany János u. 32.        The Budapest Week then and now    Public talk by the former editors Michael Kovrig, Pablo Gorondi, and Tom Popper moderated by Esther Holbrook.  

The CEU Budapest – OSUN Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships provide an opportunity for individual research grant support for doctoral students and junior scholars to spend between 4 and 12 months in Budapest at the CEU Democracy Institute (DI) or the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives. The Blinken OSA welcomed its first two PostDoc fellows and first Ph.D. fellow in April 2022.

March, 23, 2022 at 6:00 p.m. Hey! Teachers! Russia, 2020, 90min, Russian with English and Hungarian subtitles. The film screening is followed by a discussion in Hungarian. More information: https://felelemnelkul.org/programok/beiskolazva FILM SCREENING March 30, 2022 at 6:00 p.m. Courage Germany, 2021, 90 min. Belarusian, Russian Director: Aliaksei Paluyan ** Curatorial guided tour in Hungarian April 1, 2022 at 5:30 p.m. ** TALK Friday, April 8, 2022, 6:00 p.m. Borderless Knowledge: fearless speech - The limits and reality of free speech Registration: https://bit.ly/3r2GI0p Venue: 1051 Budapest, Nádor u. 15. Auditorium Online: https://youtu.be/i5MFJ8JUkK4 ** fearless poems -  Day of Hungarian Poetry - Fearless Event Series campaign April 11, 2022, all-day ** Film Screening Wednesday, April 20, 2022, 6:00 p.m. Registration is required: https://forms.office.com/r/M7tHfZ3e2W Uppercase Print (2020) documentary excerpt, Romanian with English and Hungarian subtitles directed by Radu Jude HI Film Productions

Blinken OSA contributed to the temporary building of the new Vienna Campus of Central European University in the form of wall decorations or mini exhibitions. The purpose of the project is twofold; to improve the aesthetics of university spaces by providing intellectual and visual stimuli, and to enhance the Archives’s visibility in Vienna, with photos and informative descriptions related to our holdings. The mini exhibitions comprising more than 200 images now enrich areas of the CEU Library and Media Hub, the Department of Medieval Studies, the Department of History, the Records Management offices, and the Department of Legal Studies.

While the forced relocation of CEU teaching activities to Vienna and the Covid-related restrictions have made research hard in the past two years, Blinken OSA is happy to be able to offer special tools to overcome difficulties.

Exhibition opening and Litera award ceremony: March 16, 2022. Arany János u. 32, 1051 Budapest, Hungary Litera Award Ceremony: 5:00 pm Followed by the official exhibition opening The Litera portal and Blinken OSA issued a joint open call and a joint literary call by invitation in November 2021, titled My story of cowardice. At the Award Ceremony, the two winning short stories will be presented along with the awards and the juries’ comments. Exhibition Opening: 6:00 pm Curator: István Rév Opening messages by: Elena Zhemkova, Executive Director of International Memorial (the organization was liquidated in the Russian Federation on 28.02.2022), and Miklós Gáspár Tamás, philosopher

The five-week project, an archival internship for 13 Erasmus Mundus students enrolled in the interuniversity program History in the Public Sphere, came to an end. It took place in the Archives and lasted from January 10 to February 11, 2022. The program was titled Fearless Speech and Its Fate in the Archives.

The 19th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival will be held November 8–16, 2022, in art cinemas in Budapest and in cities across Hungary. Applicants can submit their documentary films until May 31, 2022. The films would fall into one of three categories: International, Student & Debut Film, or the Hungarian Competition, while addressing the latest human rights and social issues. Submissions can be entered free of charge.

Related Events - Records Uncovered 2.0: LGBTQI+ histories in Central and Southeastern Europe - Exhibition Attention: Visiting Blinken OSA is allowed only with a valid COVID-19 vaccination certificate. When you arrive, wear a mask and keep your distance. Event registration is a must for visitors. Blinken OSA Archívum / Centrális Galéria Arany János u. 32, 1051 Budapest Tuesday–Sunday: 10:00 a.m.– 6:00 p.m.

Blinken OSA is happy to announce that three new archival series of the sub-fond Western Press Archives have recently been introduced to the online catalog, and are available for research in the Archives’s Research Room!

In 2022, the Háttér Society is organizing LGBT History Month for the tenth time. On the occasion of the milestone anniversary, we present, together with Blinken OSA, the exhibition Records Uncovered 2.0: LGBTQI+ histories in Central and Southeastern Europe. In connection with the theme, we will screen the documentary Out in East Berlin - Lesbians & Gays in the GDR, which will be introduced by one of the directors, Jochen Hick.

On January 10, 2022, on the third anniversary of the death of Mihály Csákó, the John Wesley Theological College’s Pedlabor workshop organized a commemorative conference, where his former colleagues and friends remembered one of the founders of the Hungarian sociology of education, a renowned researcher of political sociology.

Blinken OSA, with the professors and the students of the Freeszfe Association, has launched a joint project titled fearless speech in the first semester of the 2021/22 academic year. The program series includes seminars and lectures, as well as a literary competition, an exhibition, film screenings, and theater performances. The program series continues with the History in Public Sphere (HIPS) internship course titled Fearless Speech and its fate in the archives. This internship is part of the HIPS initiative seeking to offer courses that “focuses on the ways the past is represented, contested, and negotiated in the public sphere, exploring various contexts from the early Modern period to the present in a comparative and transnational way.” HIPS is a CEU Erasmus Mundus program, students join the program from all over the world (e.g., from the Philippines, India, Latin America, and the US), providing the Archives an excellent opportunity for wider recognition. Thus, the Blinken OSA collections get problematized and researched at a global scale. According to Blinken OSA Research Fellow Ioana Macrea-Toma, “theoretical lectures and hands-on archival research work will help future public historians to further understand the logic and epistemic assumptions of Cold War data collections, and to translate issues having a Central and Eastern European relevance to larger global frameworks."

The program series fearless speech, a joint project of Blinken OSA and the professors and students of the Freeszfe Association, which was launched in the first semester of the 2021/2022 academic year, recently announced a call for proposals for Freeszfe members to create theater performances in the framework of the project.