The Institute for European Studies (IES) was created in 2007 within Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles (USL-B) in Brussels, Belgium. USL-B is one of the six French-speaking Belgian universities and specialises in humanities and social sciences. The IES is located in downtown Brussels, a multicultural city in the heart of Europe and home to European and international institutions, numerous interest groups, and a host of multinational companies and non-governmental organisations.
Since its creation, the IES has continuously grown. Today, it brings together around fifty researchers and academics, working daily to achieve the three main missions of the IES: teaching, research and life-long education. In 2022, thanks to the quality of its teaching and research activities, the IES was granted the status of Jean Monnet Center of Excellence under the European Commission Erasmus+ Program.
The IES runs various education and training programmes in European studies, with courses delivered in French and/or English. True to the tradition of interdisciplinarity that characterises USL-B, the IES offers its students curricula combining law, economics, political science, history, and philosophy. Its life-long training programmes are practiceoriented and gather an international audience and professorship.
The IES teaching staff includes high-level academics and researchers but also practitioners, decision-makers, and EU civil servants. It hosts an EU-labelled European Documentation Centre (EDC) which boasts over 3,000 books along with many other physical and electronic resources and adds several hundred recent works to its collection each year.
