Univ.-Prof. Dr. Claudia Kraft
Co-Director

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Claudia Kraft
Co-Director

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. She is the speaker of the Research Platform "Transformations and Eastern Europe" and Member of the Research Platform "Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities" (GAIN) and of the Research Group "History of Human Rights and Democracy".

Research interests:

•   European Contemporary History in Comparative Perspective
•   History of Central and Eastern Europe since the 18th Century
•   Gender History
•   History of State Socialist Societies After World War II
•   Transnational 20th Century Legal History
•   Theory of History and Concepts of Area Studies


Research project:

From 2016-2021 she had been co-directing with Jerzy Kochanowski the German-Polish research project (DFG/NCN) about "Rooms for Manoeuvre in State Socialism", which investigated forms of historical agency in East Central Europe before and after 1989.

At the moment she is developing a new project on transnational debates about gender equality under the conditions of the Cold War: "Transforming Rights: Entangled Debates about Gender Equality during and after the Cold War".


Recent publications:

Claudia Kraft: East Central Europe as Historical and Conceptual Space. On the production of knowledge from an (historical) area studies perspective, in: Huigen, Siegfried/Kołodziejczyk, Dorota (eds.), Central Europe between the Colonial and the Postcolonial (Palgrave Macmillan forthcoming in 2022).

Dietlind Hüchtker/Claudia Kraft/Katrin Steffen (eds.): At the Intersection of Self and Society. History of Sexuality in 20th Eastern Europe (Special Issue of Nordost-Archiv 29/2020), forthcoming in 2022.

Claudia Kraft: Leben und Forschen in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft: Eine Lektürempfehlung für Mithu Sanyals „Identitti", in: Perlen geschichtswissenschaftlicher Reflexion: östliches Europa, sozialgeschichtliche Interventionen, imperiale Vergleiche, hrsg. v. Christoph Augustynowicz, Dietlind Hüchtker, Börries Kuzmany. Wien 2022, 297-302.

Christa Hämmerle/Claudia Kraft/Alexandra Oberländer/Rukima Barua (eds.): Fluid Feelings. (Special Isssue of L'Homme – Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 32/2021).

Jerzy Kochanowski/Claudia Kraft (eds.): Rooms for Manoeuvre: another look at negotiating processes in the Socialist Bloc. Göttingen 2021.

 

Full list of publications: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5387-7469.

Full CV