In the context of International Women's Day on March 8, we are highlighting the research our students are currently conducting into gender history. Gender history by faculty and students in our department spans the period from late antiquity to the present day, encompassing pre-modern sexualities, intersections of science, race and gender, gender in Arab and Mediterranean studies, and women's labor activism. Below, we explore the work of three of our PhD researchers, organized chronologically.
Nelson Bennett's PhD project, entitled Kingly Queens: Power and Gender in the Post-Roman West, 400-700 CE, aims to understand late antique women in political power in their specific contexts. The broad scope of his research encompasses the inter-state level to allow for a comparative analysis of these women across different late antique polities in territories formerly under the control of the Western Roman Emperors. He intends to produce a dissertation that explores the post-Roman courts of the Frankish, Visigoth, Ostrogoth and Vandal kingdoms. Nelson's work is supervised by Volker Menze and Cristian Gaşpar.
Jelena Tesija is currently working on the part of her doctoral thesis that focuses on the international labour activism of women cooperators from socialist Yugoslavia in the 1950s. She discusses their contributions to the work of the International Co-operative Women's Guild (ICWG) - an international cooperative organisation that brought together women activists of different ideological positions. Her work is undertaken as part of the ZARAH: Women's Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, From the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century project cohosted with the Department of Gender Studies at CEU. Prof. Susan Zimmermann is the principal investigator.
Gulrano Ataeva studies how women in Central Asia experienced and negotiated their subjecthood under Soviet rule. Her MA research explored Kyrgyz and Uzbek women's journals during the late Soviet reforms, where they critically engaged with the state's promises of emancipation through labor and their visions of nationhood. Her PhD study now focuses on the lived realities of women by examining how labor experiences unfolded within industrial policies, family expectations, and cultural and religious frameworks, complicating the official narrative of emancipation. She works with Prof. Charles Shaw.
Photo credit: Gulrano Ataeva