Israeli Inter-University Academic Partnership in Russian and East European Studies (IUAP)

The Israeli Inter-University Academic Partnership in Russian and East European Studies is an innovative institutional platform for sharing, exchanging and disseminating knowledge among Israel’s five leading Universities:

• Ben Gurion University of the Negev
• University of Haifa
• Bar Ilan University
• Tel Aviv University
• The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

With the support of the Humanities Fund (established by Yad Ha’Nadiv and espoused by the Council for Higher Education) the partnership provides funding and institutional basis for cross-disciplinary teaching, research and publication in East European studies in Israel. The partnership pools together academic resources from five universities and creates a wide and diverse community of scholars that enjoys the high-quality specialties of each university while broadening the study of this area. The cooperative approach of the partnership fundamentally restructures and re-conceptualizes East European and Russian Studies in Israel and seeks to bring Israeli Universities to the forefront of East European Studies in the world.

The partnership offers several doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships each year thus providing an academic home for young scholars in the field as well as an opportunity to share their knowledge through teaching and presenting their work at a yearly inter-disciplinary conference. As part of joining forces between universities, the partnership coordinates joint workshops, language studies and content-courses by making existing panels available to students of all five universities. In addition, starting in the next academic year, “virtual” participation of students will be possible in inter-university seminars and a web-based forum for Russian and East European studies will offer relevant information and contacts to students of the consortium.