Call for Papers: Gender and Materiality in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century

On September 30 and October 1, 2021, the Sciences Po Centre for History will organise an international interdisciplinary conference on Gender and Materiality in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. The  keynote lecture will be delivered by Kristen Ghodsee, Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Applications will be accepted from doctoral candidates and early-career researchers working in all relevant  academic disciplines, including history, gender studies, memory studies, anthropology, material culture studies, and other fields.

Call for papers

Today gender history in Eastern Europe is no longer “an archipelago of individual efforts, often disconnected and emergent, erupting periodically like so many volcanic islands'', as Maria Bucur defined the emerging field more than ten years ago. Although research on gender in Central and Eastern Europe has received much scholarly attention in recent years, scholarship that combines the theoretical frameworks of gender studies and material culture is still scarce. The scholarship on consumerism in Eastern bloc countries has explored gendered patterns of customary activities and symbolism of material things, including fashion. Besides this, the relationship between war and gendered corporeality in Eastern Europe’s violent 20th century have been discussed substantially in recent years,  especially by Holocaust historians working on sexual and sexualized violence against Jewish women and other gendered bodily experiences in the context of genocidal violence. Finally, gender was central to the (re)construction of collective national identities in a series of so-called Yugoslav wars, and led a number of scholars to explore precisely the gendered bodily experiences of these wars. In this context the following questions could be raised, but not limited to:

• Gender and corporality
• Materiality of gender: norms and deviations
• Gendered objects on movement
• Gender, objects and violence

Read the Call for Papers (PDF 442 Ko)

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