The planned work on the project was altered during the pandemic. The project, however, kept its focus on the thinkers and ideas that shaped the debate and interplay between socialism and feminism in the interwar period and during the early phase of socialism in Hungary, Yugoslavia, and the GDR. The research was conducted in Budapest, Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana and Berlin. The project’s focus was expanded to a large-scale collection of sources and introducing their authors in a volume of source texts entitled Texts and Contexts from the History of Women’s Rights and Feminism in East Central Europe.
The planned training and career development at the Host Institution could continue flawlessly: Professor Celia Donert, who supervised this project from start, and the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge did their best to accommodate my access to all events and meetings at the Faculty, and I also joined Wolfson College as a Junior Research Fellow, broadening my interdisciplinary scope of activities. The IEF was indeed decisive in enabling me to make the transition from an early-career researcher to a fully independent scholar.
Overview of the results and dissemination:
- Journal article “International Solidarity as the Cornerstone of the Hungarian Post-War Socialist Women’s Rights Agenda in Women’s Magazines”, International Review of Social History, Vol. 67. Special Issue 30. 2022. 103-129.
- Edited volume of source texts Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights. East Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century. With Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz. Budapest – New York: CEU Press. Forthcoming in 2023.
- Beyond the already published article and the edited volume in press, during the course of the project, I began the preparations of a co-edited journal special issue (with Isidora Grubački and Emily Steinhauer) about women’s political thought in East Central Europe, to be submitted to peer review to the journal of Modern Intellectual History in mid/late 2023.
- Three articles to be submitted by August 2023, resulting from the project:
o “Women and Democracy in the Work of Women Intellectuals in Post-1945 Hungary”. Special issue “It’s Complicated. Social Struggles and the Entanglement of Political Participation and Fundamental Rights”, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften / Austrian Journal of Historical Studies 2025/1
o “Marxist Feminism and Violence against Women in the Work of the Croatian Philosopher Blaženka Despot“. Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, Volume II, Issue 3, 2023.
o “Communist women between radicalism and consensus interwar Hungary.” Political Crisis in Central Europe in the Interwar Period and Today”, ed. Martin Schulze Wessel, Brill, 2024.
- Wikipedia articles about the most important characters are to be uploaded after the publication of the articles above, so that my work can be referenced.
- Conference talks at the ASSEES and BASEES conventions, the European Congress on World and Global History, the Imre Kertész Kolleg’s (Jena) Annual Conference, and workshops and smaller scale conferences in Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Spain, the UK, among others.
- Workshop series of 5 workshops about women’s political thought, with the participation of about 30 scholars working on Central and Eastern Europe. Online, University of Cambridge.
- Workshop “Marginalised Women and Socialism”, Spring 2022, University of Cambridge.
- Two summer schools about intellectual history in East Central Europe, both with a day focusing on women’s intellectual history, in cooperation with the Research Netword Intellectual History in East Central Europe
https://intellectualhistoryece.wordpress.com/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)o July 2021 Ljubljana, Institute of Contemporary History
o July 2022, Jena, Friedrich Schiller University and Imre Kertész Kolleg
The training I received from my supervisor, Professor Donert, and the research support team at the University of Cambridge in research project management (including grant-writing), public engagement, and research impact were crucial in helping me win an ERC Starting Grant in 2022.
