For over thirty years, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies has gathered Harvard faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, Boston-area academics, visiting scholars, public servants, and journalists seeking to advance the understanding of modern European history, politics, society, and culture. We have followed such developments as the evolution of labor relations, political radicalism, the impact on collective memory of revolution and war, the development of the European Union, the transitions of communist Eastern Europe, and the continual construction of identities, whether defined by gender, migration, nation, or faith. Europe has challenged us all as an ever-vital site of tradition and innovation.

CES's Busch Hall, originally the site of the university's Germanic Museum, provides offices currently for eighteen faculty members and fourteen affiliated graduate students. It also houses long- and short-term researchers from North American, European, and other institutions overseas. We impose no scholarly agenda but encourage our visitors to share their interests and expertise in seminars and informal exchange. The Center grants about fifteen fellowships for a year of dissertation research to students from Harvard and MIT social-science and humanities departments. It also awards about twenty-five summer grants that facilitate exploration of dissertation topics and allow undergraduates to undertake senior-thesis research in Europe. Throughout the academic year, CES sponsors seminars, lectures, conferences, and workshops that bring together students, academic visitors, and distinguished European public officials and intellectuals. Over the last decade and a half, we have been designated as a Center of Excellence for German and for European Union studies. We have also organized a program of CES dialogues in Berlin that coordinates American and European speakers and Harvard students engaged in research abroad.

Center alumni have gone on to hold leading faculty positions and other responsible positions in this country and in Europe. Stanley Hoffmann, together with Guido Goldman, founded and directed the Center for many years. In the last decade the Center has been directed by Charles Maier and Peter Hall and in the current academic year will be led in the fall again by Charles Maier, and then from January 2007 on by David Blackbourn. An interdisciplinary steering committee assists in governance, and a circle of outside friends provides perspective and support from beyond Harvard. Interested Harvard college students participate in an active undergraduate board.

The Center invites the participation of the Harvard and the greater Boston university communities, as well as all other interested individuals, in its multiple activities. This website and the printed monthly calendar provide a guide to upcoming events, fellowship opportunities, and the diverse research activities of CES colleagues. As Europe's societies undergo rapid, often unsettling transformation, as the disciplines that study these changes likewise evolve, the Center for European Studies will continue to provide one of the country's liveliest forums for understanding this ferment.

- Charles S. Maier and David Blackbourn