About UNIDICE and the project team

UNIDICE – Unity, Diversity and Identity in Central Europe is an Erasmus+ project co-funded by the European Union, bringing together universities, scholars, students, and experts from across Central Europe. The project explores how Central Europe has been imagined, organised, divided, remembered, and continuously redefined throughout history — and what these historical experiences mean for the region today.

UNIDICE did not begin from scratch. It grew out of two years of close cooperation within the RECALL project, where colleagues from our partner universities created a shared academic and educational environment involving 15 university lecturers and researchers and more than 30 students. Through workshops, joint discussions, teaching activities, and the development of innovative educational materials, RECALL demonstrated the value of approaching Central European history through sustained international cooperation.

UNIDICE is the next step in this shared journey. It builds on the academic community, mutual trust, working methods, and experience developed during RECALL, while significantly broadening both the thematic scope and the ambition of our cooperation. What began as a two-year collaboration has grown into a longer-term Central European network connecting scholars, students, and institutions across national borders.

At the centre of UNIDICE is a deceptively simple question:

What does Central Europe mean — historically, culturally, politically, and today?

Central Europe has never had a single, universally accepted meaning. Its borders have shifted, its political structures have changed, and its societies have repeatedly negotiated questions of belonging, identity, cooperation, conflict, and historical memory. Rather than searching for one fixed definition of the region, UNIDICE approaches Central Europe as a historical space shaped simultaneously by unity, diversity, and identity.

The project therefore creates a shared platform where different national perspectives and historiographical traditions can meet. By bringing together established scholars, younger researchers, students, and wider audiences, UNIDICE seeks not to create one uniform story of Central Europe, but to understand how its different histories are connected, where they diverge, and how they continue to shape the region.

As an Erasmus+ cooperation project, UNIDICE combines academic research, international collaboration, innovative education, and student participation. Its objectives include strengthening historical awareness of Central European identity, fostering cooperation among scholars, students, and institutions, developing new educational tools and academic publications, and giving younger generations an active role in academic discussion.

Over the course of the project, these goals come together through a common intellectual structure: nine major themes, 27 workshops, an international edited volume, and a nine-module online course. Rather than functioning as separate outputs, the workshops, publication, and course grow out of the same discussions and expert contributions, creating one connected academic and educational programme.

To explore this question, the project follows nine major themes ranging from the changing geographical and conceptual boundaries of Central Europe to Christianisation, empires and nations, revolutions, wars and migration, regional cooperation, post-1989 transformations, memory politics, and possible futures of Central European identity.

These themes allow us to look beyond national historical narratives and to place familiar events, debates, and historical figures into a wider comparative Central European context

A central principle of UNIDICE is that its activities are not developed separately from one another. The workshop series, edited volume, and university course follow the same nine-topic intellectual structure and are designed to inform and strengthen each other.

Academic debates generated during the workshops feed into the development of the publication and teaching materials. Contributors to the volume can participate in the workshops and course, while students and invited experts become part of the same international conversation.

In this way, UNIDICE is not simply producing a collection of events or individual outputs. It is building a shared framework through which Central European history can be discussed, compared, taught, and reconsidered.

The project organises 27 academic workshops across Central Europe, structured around nine thematic areas.

Each topic consists of one international workshop and two national workshops. Their format combines focused academic discussion with public roundtable conversations, bringing together established scholars, younger researchers, doctoral students, and university audiences.

The workshops create spaces where national historiographical traditions can meet, different interpretations can be compared, and familiar historical questions can be reconsidered from a broader regional perspective.

The discussions developed through the project will contribute to an international English-language edited volume provisionally entitled:

Unity, Identity and Diversity: History and Memory of Central Europe – An Introduction

Designed as a selective and accessible academic handbook, the volume will present major questions, concepts, events, debates, and case studies from Central European history through approximately ninety concise contributions organised into nine thematic chapters.

The aim is not to produce an encyclopaedia of Central Europe, but to offer students, teachers, researchers, and interested readers a carefully structured introduction to some of the questions that have shaped the region.

UNIDICE will also transform its academic discussions into an international nine-module online course.

Each module will combine expert contributions, narrative video content, recommended materials, and e-learning activities. The course will build directly on the same intellectual framework as the workshops and publication, allowing research produced within the project to become accessible teaching material.

Students will not only participate in the course but will also contribute to its development and testing. Their involvement is an important part of our aim to make the project genuinely accessible, international, and student-centred.

UNIDICE is also about creating connections.

Through workshops, editorial meetings, study sessions, virtual professors' meetings, student participation, and the Professors' Hub, the project brings together academics from different generations, institutions, disciplines, and national research traditions.

The aim is to create a network that lasts beyond individual events — a community in which ideas, research questions, teaching practices, and perspectives on Central Europe can continue to circulate.

History in Central Europe has often been written within national borders. Yet many of the region's most important historical processes have never respected those borders.

Dynasties, religions, empires, universities, intellectual movements, revolutions, wars, migrations, political ideas, memories, and identities have always travelled across them.

UNIDICE therefore starts from the conviction that understanding Central Europe requires conversation across national historiographies.

It does not seek to erase different historical experiences or produce one common narrative. Instead, it asks how those differences can be placed alongside one another — and what we can learn when the histories of Central Europe are discussed together.

Unity. Diversity. Identity. Three ideas that have shaped Central Europe for centuries — and three questions that remain open today.

UNIDICE is made possible by an international community of historians, educators, project coordinators, researchers, students, and partner institutions working together across Central Europe.

Meet the people responsible for the academic direction, project coordination, thematic development, research, communication, student engagement, and implementation of the project.