arguably the most important institution of its kind in the world.

It celebrates this year its centenary.

Everyone is a specialist in the region. Everyone is

exceptionally well-travelled in the region.

Given that we are studying one particular part of the word, and given that we often

sort of focus on specific social issues,

it's sort of quite clear that you can’t study these issues from one single disciplinary

perspective.

The world out there isn't neatly divided into different disciplines.

One of the good things about studying at SSEES is that people are not only a part

of UCL,

which can be sometimes really big, but they also belong to a small community.

One-on-one, the smaller classes we were in with some of the professors that I worked with, they

made a

a big impression on me because they were very learned people, they were

kind of good people, you know they wanted to share their knowledge, and

it's those kind of smaller groups, those classrooms where you’re working

with individual professors and how that affects you as a person.

My day-to-day life is spent

with the history staff, with fellow history PhDs,

but you come into contact with a whole range of people who are doing

different disciplines, so they’re doing literature, they’re doing economics, they’re doing

modern

foreign policy. SSEES has a very, very

important element to it, which is its area focus, which goes

hand-in-hand with its interdisciplinarity. Just being

surrounded by these people talking about ideas, it really broadens your mind

and my research is quite interdisciplinary anyway, so I find it a

really useful stimulus just to make me think in

other directions, and I really don't think that I would have got that if I’d just been

in the history department at another university. Over the course of time my

research shifted quite significantly away from international relations

and looks much more at sort of migration, sexuality and health,

and this wasn't the result of my attending

seminars and lectures at SSEES, or at least not only

due to that, but it was sort of talking to colleagues in the corridors or over

a coffee

in the senior common room, asking what they were working on,

and my interest sort of being piqued and

my research therefore being sent off in

unexpected directions.

Here we believe that language is culture, so

that’s the approach from which we teach the languages. At this point in time,

we may be the only institution in the world that teaches

18 languages of the region. All the academics working at

SSEES are obviously fluent in a number of these East European languages

and they incorporate these language skills into their research, and that brings about

very important cultural insights into whatever discipline

one is engaged in doing research.

The school was founded by several extraordinary individuals,

among them the three most prominent are Sir Bernard Pares,

Robert Seton-Watson and Tomas

Garrigue Masaryk. Masaryk delivered a very important lecture

in October 1915 on the fate of small nations of Europe. He later became the

first president

of independent Czechoslovakia. Many prominent scholars,

politicians, artists, writers

from the region, who were later joined by a

set of extraordinary researchers from all over the world,

produced a remarkable body of scholarships over these

100 years and trained a broad range of students.

Among our alumni

we count prime ministers, parliamentarians,

functionaries of many important international organisations

and many successful business people.