Elzbieta Matynia is a professor of sociology and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research. She received her PhD in 1979 from the University of Warsaw in Poland, before moving to the United States in 1980. Matynia worked as a visiting professor at The New School before accepting positions at Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College, eventually returning to The New School in 1986, where she was hired as an adjunct professor. Her research is in political and cultural sociology, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe and issues of gender and democracy. She was the coordinator of the East and Central Europe Program (ECEP) until its replacement in 1997 by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, where she remains the founding director. Matynia took over the chair of the New York Democracy Seminar in 1990, and organized the International Democracy Seminars from 1990-1994.

The Democracy Seminars were the genesis of what is, in 2022, the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS), a research institute at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) founded by New School professor of sociology and liberal studies, Elzbieta Matynia, in New York City in the spring of 1997.

TCDS was established to accommodate the expanding activities of the East and Central Europe Program (ECEP), which was founded by Matynia at The New School in 1990. ECEP emerged out of the Democracy Seminars, a semi-clandestine series of seminars on democratic politics and culture initially held in New York, Warsaw, and Budapest from 1984 until the mid-1990s, with Matynia overseeing the New York seminar at the time of ECEP’s establishment. In response to the revolutions of 1989, which saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and of communism across Eastern Europe, the Graduate Faculty at the New School (which was re-named NSSR in 2005) established ECEP, "to assist regional efforts to revitalize scholarly life in the social sciences." Using the network established by the Democracy Seminars, the program initially encompassed five countries: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The reorganization of ECEP as a component of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies allowed for the TCDS to expand its scope to other regions, such as Central Asia, Latin America, and Southern Africa.

TCDS’s most notable initiative is the Democracy & Diversity Institute, an annual graduate-level summer program first held in Krakow, Poland in 1992, and moving to Wroclaw in 2009. A South African institute was held from 1999-2009 in Cape Town, and from 2012-2015 in Johannesburg. The institute is open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students worldwide, and offers courses in the social sciences and humanities, centered around a theme which reflects current issues in politics and political thought. The program awards a certificate to non-New School students, while New School students receive course credit. From 1997-1999, TCDS also held The American Experience Summer Institute in New York, an American counterpart to the Democracy Seminars for international students.

From 1997 until 2010, TCDS oversaw the Journal Donation Project, which solicited donated or discounted subscriptions to social science periodicals from academic publishers for libraries throughout the world. In 2010, the project was taken over by the new Center for Public Scholarship, which oversaw it until the project’s end in 2018.

ECEP and then TCDS published a biannual journal called Bulletin, which contained essays and letters sent in from affiliates of the Center engaged in fieldwork around the world. Bulletin was published until 2009.

After the Kosovo War in 1999, the TCDS launched Towards an Architecture of Peace, a program that aimed to expand the Democracy Seminars and many other TCDS initiatives into Kosovo and Serbia. In 2015, the TCDS established the NSSR-Europe Collective, an alumni network for TCDS and New School graduates in Europe that supports initiatives related to academic freedom, civil society and public scholarship.

TCDS has also provided a number of teaching fellowships, many of them inherited from ECEP. These include the Democracy Fellowship for advanced graduate students in Eastern and Central Europe and the Visiting Professorship in Democracy for early-career academics.

As of 2020, Elzbieta Matynia continues to direct the TCDS. The TCDS has also at times had an International Steering Committee, composed of “Special International Advisors”: distinguished scholars from outside The New School, representing the various regions TCDS was concerned with. This committee was chaired by the president of The New School.

Sources

“Transregional Center for Democratic Studies” newschool.edu, 21 Feb. 2002, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20020221035624/http://www.newschool.edu/centers/tcds/frame.html

Graduate Faculty 1997 -1998 Vol. 54 No. 8 (1997): 10. https://digitalarchives.library.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS050101_gf1997ye. New School Archives and Special Collections Digital Archive. 03 April 2020

Matynia, E. “From Assistance and Mutual Learning: to Partnership: The Experience of the Graduate Faculty’s East and Central Europe Program”, German-American Academic Council Conference, Halle, Germany, November 1995. https://web.archive.org/web/19980204011321/http://www.newschool.edu/centers/ecep/narra.htm

New School for Social Research 2011-2012 Vol. 69 No. 2 (2011): 67. https://digitalarchives.library.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS050101_gf2011ye. New School Archives and Special Collections Digital Archive. 03 April 2020

“The American Experience”, newschool.edu, 21 Feb 2002, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20020223165209fw_/http://www.newschool.edu/centers/tcds/amex01.htm

“Transregional Center for Democratic Studies East and Central Europe Program Bulletin, Vol. 9/4 (Issue 34) – February, 2000”, newschool.edu, 21 Feb 2002, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20020416163202fw_/http://www.newschool.edu/centers/tcds/bul034.htm#bul3404

NSSR-Europe, NSSR-Europe Declaration (2015). https://blogs.newschool.edu/tcds/2015/05/05/nssr-europe-declaration/. Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. 03 April 2020

“The Pew Charitable Trusts Democracy Fellowships, 1992-1995“, newschool.edu, 4 Feb. 1998, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/19980204015822/http://www.newschool.edu/centers/ecep/pew92.htm