The Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna and the Research Platform "Transformations and Eastern Europe" invite to their regular Transformative Salon on 5 December 2024 at 7 PM, this time with Zsófia Lóránd (RECET/University of Vienna), Claudia Kraft (RECET/University of Vienna), and Celia Donert (Cambridge University).
Venue: Café Merkur, Florianigasse 18, 1080 Vienna.
The Transformative Salon will entail the book launch of "Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights, East Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century" (Zsófia Lóránd, Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz; CEU Press 2024), accompanied by a discussion between Zsófia Lóránd, Claudia Kraft, and Celia Donert. The Transformative will be moderated by Rosamund Johnston.
A compendium of one hundred sources, preceded by a short author’s bio and an introduction, this volume offers an English language selection of the most representative texts on feminism and women’s rights from East Central Europe between the end of World War Two and the early 1990s. While communist era is the primary focus, the interwar years and the post-1989 transition period also receive attention. All texts are new translations from the original.
The book is organised around themes instead of countries; the similarities and differences between nations are nevertheless pointed out. The editors consider women not only in their local context, but also in conjunction with other systems of thought—including shared agendas with socialism, liberalism, nationalism, and even eugenics.
The choice of texts seeks to demonstrate how feminism as political thought was shaped and organised in the region. They vary in type and format from political treatises, philosophy to literary works, even films and the visual arts, with the necessary inclusion of the personal and the private. Women’s political rights, right to education, their role in nation-building, women, and war (and especially women and peace) are part of the anthology, alongside the gendered division of labour, violence against women, the body, and reproduction.
Zsófia Lóránd is Assistant Professor at the Department of Contemporary History and RECET at the University of Vienna. Earlier, she was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Faculty of History and Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge, and had held positions at the European University Institute in Florence and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the University of Göttingen. Her book, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia focusing on the intellectual history of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s was published in 2018 and got translated into Croatian in 2020. Currently, she is working as PI on her ERC-funded project HERESSEE “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929 – 2001”.
Celia Donert is a historian of Central Europe in the twentieth century. Her research seeks to explore the history of socialism, nationalism, gender, and human rights in contemporary Europe from a transnational and global perspective. She is a Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Cambridge's Wolfson College.
Claudia Kraft is a Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna since 2018. Before coming to Vienna she had worked at the University of Siegen as a Professor of Contemporary European History (2011-2018) and at the University of Erfurt as a Professor of Central and Eastern European History (2005-2011). She specializes in 20th century comparative European and particularly Central and Eastern European History.
Rosamund Johnston is the Principal Investigator of Linking Arms: Central Europe´s Weapons Industries, 1954-1994 at RECET. She is the author of Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 which appeared with Stanford University Press in March 2024. Her research has been published in Central European History and a number of edited volumes. She has also written for the Journal of Cold War Studies, East Central Europe, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Scottish newspaper The National, and public broadcaster Czech Radio. Johnston is the author of one book of public history, Havel in America: Interviews with American Intellectuals, Politicians, and Artists, released by Czech publisher Host in 2019.
FREE ENTRY. No registration is needed to participate. The event language is English.
The organisers plan to record the event and publish it on the RECET YouTube channel 2-3 days later.