The Council for European Studies (CES) has changed a great deal since our 25th anniversary celebration in 1995. In its earliest years, the CES was supported largely through one major funder, and it held a relatively small biennial conference exclusively in the United States. The primary participants were US-based scholars of European politics and society, their graduate students, and a small number of intrepid Europeans willing to travel to Chicago in March. These gatherings were intimate affairs, counting roughly 500 participants, all of whom stayed in the conference hotel.

Since that time, the CES has grown. Although we still receive support for graduate student dissertation completion grants, the CES does not rely heavily on foundations to carry out its mission. It now organizes conferences every year, with even-year meetings typically held in North America and odd-year conferences in Europe. We have built a wider base of targeted grant-funded projects that integrate individual and institutional members on both sides of the Atlantic. This transition has proven phenomenally successful for broadening the number and types of people that connect through the CES. Approximately 800–1,000 participants attend our North American conferences and 1,200–1,500 gather in the European years. Our attendees come from traditional areas of strength such as political science, sociology, history, and anthropology, but also from fields like law, communications, economics, geography, cultural studies, urban studies, the humanities, business, and the arts.

Research networks have become hubs of activity for most of our members. They foster interdisciplinary approaches to the study of pressing issues such as immigration, social movements, the welfare state, or gender and sexuality. Our research networks nurture intellectual and social ties that help stitch CES members together. They host mini-conferences, work on collaborative projects, draw on CES resources when applying for grants, and publish collections of their work in our online platform EuropeNow. They allocate funding toward graduate student participation at the annual conference, bestow prizes, hold receptions, connect members with scholarly journals, and much more. Research networks thus often create the intimacy that marked the earliest years of the CES, while simultaneously drawing in new scholars, graduate students, universities, and foundation support.