Catherine focused on how ideas and national narratives/collective memory influence behavior in International Relations during her studies at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. With this, she became interested in Central and Eastern Europe during her study abroad in Prague, which exposed her to the post-communist space and their unique histories and transition trajectories. Particularly, courses about European history and politics as well as Czech films made her better understand different ways that the communist experience shaped people’s thinking about current politics from this side of the world. This eventually led her to CEU as she aims to deepen these interests.
At CEU, she plans to explore how higher education/intellectual institutions are positioned in populist discourses and employ the methodological tools of qualitative and quantitative text analysis through the help of the Department of Political Science. On top of this, she hopes to finish the Advanced Certificate in Political Thought offered by different departments at CEU, including our very own, and eventually pursue a PhD with her rigorous CEU academic training in mind.