About Us

UCL SSEES is one of the world’s leading centres for research and teaching on Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, the Baltics, Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Ever since SSEES was founded in 1915, the region we study has remained a cauldron of global geopolitics. Variously conceived as a kaleidoscope of nation states, a confrontation of ideologically opposed blocs, or a unitary Eurasian landmass, the vast area stretching eastward from Germany to the Pacific Ocean and southward from the Arctic to the Black Sea incorporates a huge range of national languages and cultures for you to explore. 

Over a thousand students from sixty countries study for our highly-rated undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Taught by more than eighty specialist researchers, our graduates leave UCL with disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise in some of the contemporary world’s most crucial questions. Populism, international security, migration, memory politics, corruption, economic integration, and global informal practices rank high among the themes that run across our four programme areas: Economics & Business, Politics & Sociology, History, and Languages & Cultures.

Our teaching is supported by the internationally-renowned library at the heart of the SSEES building, by our interdisciplinary research centres and seminars, and by lectures and symposia that bring together experts from London and around the world. For those who want to venture further, most of our undergraduate programmes as well as our International Master’s programme can be combined with a year abroad at a university in the region.

Over the last hundred years, our region has veered between authoritarianism and freedom, war and peace, tragedy and hope. Our own world needs people who understand it in all its fascinating complexity. We hope you’ll join us!