This special edition of the Transylvania Lectures series will welcome Peter Turchin, a complexity scientist who brings science to history. The pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics—the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history—is one of the most interesting social scientists of our age. In 2010, he predicted the social and political turmoil of the 2020s—not by intuition, but through rigorous scientific models. 

His work blends biology, history, and mathematics to reveal long-term dynamics of human cooperation and disintegration. Drawing on over 25 years of research, Turchin’s latest book End Times is the culmination of his work which explores why political communities hold together or fall apart., applied to the current turmoil within the United States. 

Professor Turchin and his team studied societal cycles of over 5,000 years and identified three key factors driving nations into crises: popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and state breakdown. According to their findings, the United States meets these conditions and is undergoing significant transformation—with implications for the entire world. 

Currently his main research effort is directing the Seshat Databank project which builds historical datasets to test theories of societal evolution and collapse. He investigates a set of broad and interrelated questions: How do human societies evolve? In particular, what processes explain the evolution of ultrasociality—our capacity to cooperate in huge anonymous societies of millions? What processes are responsible for the resilience of complex societies? What causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart? 

In 2021 he was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Turchin has authored ten books, his most recent are End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023) and The Great Holocene Transformation (forthcoming). He is Editor-in-Chief of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution. 

His academic affiliations are: Project Leader of Social Complexity and Collapse, Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria Research Associate, School of Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology, and Mathematics, University of Connecticut, USA. 

Moderator: Magor Örs Köllő, software engineer, MCC alumnus. He holds a bachelor's degree in system engineering from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, a master's in business management from Babeș–Bolyai University, and he is completing a second master’s in Artificial Intelligence. He spent a semester at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, broadening his academic perspective. Currently, he works as a Lead Software Engineer at a fintech trading company, teaches STEM to talented youth at MCC, and leads an NGO that supports young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. 

Event language: English. Hungarian and Romanian translation will be provided. We kindly ask you to inform us of your intention to attend by filling in the form below:

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