For the societies of Central and Eastern Europe, the century since the Balkan Wars has been a time of profound ruptures. The contributors to this volume examine how academic communities lived through different transitions, such as the collapse of empires, the two World Wars, the Yugoslav and the post-Soviet wars. How did academic institutions relate to informal or underground social movements? What is the place of refugee scholars in the current moment of Russian expansionism? As they rethink the history of Europe’s universities, the authors offer a new understanding of how knowledge communities have shaped, and been shaped by, upheaval, bridging the gap between histories of knowledge and new political histories of the region.

Friedrich Cain is a PostDoc Assistant at the Faculty Center for Transdisciplinary Historical Cultural Studies at Universität Wien. He works on the history of science and the humanities and has a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe. His current project covers the history of science studies in Western and Eastern Germany during the Cold War. He is a founding member of the research initiative Political Epistemologies of Central and Eastern Europe (PECEE), which analyses the reciprocal production of scientific and political programs in the 20th century. --- Dina Gusejnova is an associate professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she is also active as Co-PI in the Conflict and Civicness Research Group (LSE IDEAS), examining the impact of the full-scale war against Ukraine on research and education in Europe (funded by the EU). She is also a co-founder of the University of New Europe collective, an NGO which supports scholars at risk. Her own research deals with the cultural and intellectual impact of wars, internment and displacement on the history of ideas, both from a historical and from a contemporary perspective. ---