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The UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies is
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arguably the most important institution of its kind in the world.
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It celebrates this year its centenary.
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Everyone is a specialist in the region. Everyone is
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exceptionally well-travelled in the region.
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Given that we are studying one particular part of the word, and given that we often
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sort of focus on specific social issues,
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it's sort of quite clear that you can’t study these issues from one single disciplinary
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perspective.
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The world out there isn't neatly divided into different disciplines.
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One of the good things about studying at SSEES is that people are not only a part
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of UCL,
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which can be sometimes really big, but they also belong to a small community.
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One-on-one, the smaller classes we were in with some of the professors that I worked with, they
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made a
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a big impression on me because they were very learned people, they were
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kind of good people, you know they wanted to share their knowledge, and
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it's those kind of smaller groups, those classrooms where you’re working
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with individual professors and how that affects you as a person.
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My day-to-day life is spent
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with the history staff, with fellow history PhDs,
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but you come into contact with a whole range of people who are doing
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different disciplines, so they’re doing literature, they’re doing economics, they’re doing
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modern
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foreign policy. SSEES has a very, very
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important element to it, which is its area focus, which goes
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hand-in-hand with its interdisciplinarity. Just being
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surrounded by these people talking about ideas, it really broadens your mind
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and my research is quite interdisciplinary anyway, so I find it a
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really useful stimulus just to make me think in
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other directions, and I really don't think that I would have got that if I’d just been
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in the history department at another university. Over the course of time my
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research shifted quite significantly away from international relations
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and looks much more at sort of migration, sexuality and health,
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and this wasn't the result of my attending
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seminars and lectures at SSEES, or at least not only
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due to that, but it was sort of talking to colleagues in the corridors or over
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a coffee
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in the senior common room, asking what they were working on,
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and my interest sort of being piqued and
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my research therefore being sent off in
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unexpected directions.
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Here we believe that language is culture, so
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that’s the approach from which we teach the languages. At this point in time,
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we may be the only institution in the world that teaches
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18 languages of the region. All the academics working at
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SSEES are obviously fluent in a number of these East European languages
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and they incorporate these language skills into their research, and that brings about
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very important cultural insights into whatever discipline
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one is engaged in doing research.
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The school was founded by several extraordinary individuals,
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among them the three most prominent are Sir Bernard Pares,
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Robert Seton-Watson and Tomas
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Garrigue Masaryk. Masaryk delivered a very important lecture
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in October 1915 on the fate of small nations of Europe. He later became the
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first president
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of independent Czechoslovakia. Many prominent scholars,
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politicians, artists, writers
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from the region, who were later joined by a
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set of extraordinary researchers from all over the world,
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produced a remarkable body of scholarships over these
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100 years and trained a broad range of students.
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Among our alumni
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we count prime ministers, parliamentarians,
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functionaries of many important international organisations
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and many successful business people.