Past Lectures, Seminars, and Workshops

• November 2005:
  Representing Men: Masculinity, Politics, and Citizenship in Modern European History
• February 2006:
  Gender, War, and Nation in 20th Century Europe
• November 2006:
  Family, Work, and Welfare in Past and Present
• May 2007:
  Gender, Experience, and Memory, 18th-20th Centuries
• November 2007:
  Gender in Eastern European History
• February 2008:
  What is the Future of Feminist/Gender History?

Tuesday, November 6, 2007
UNC FedEx Global Education Center

Seminar, 5:00 – 6:30 pm

“How to Tell the Story of Your Grandparents?” Ethical Dilemmas of Post-Memory
A conversation with Maria Bucur-Deckard about her working paper.

The paper looks at selective postmemory of the Holocaust and Gulag, specifically issues surrounding efforts by generations born after these events to reconstruct a picture/image of those events. These efforts often use recovered artifacts (words, images, objects) but are also based in part on narratives learned by these younger generations from those who were alive when these events took place. As Bucur-Deckard argues, this is a project often imbued with personal investment and emotion, and, crucially, it is a project that raises serious moral and ethical questions for historians more generally. Our conversation, then, will deal with larger issues of memory, research agendas, politics, and the role of the historian in society. The seminar is open to all members of academic community at UNC-Chapel Hill and at other universities and colleges in region.

Public Lecture, 7:00 – 8:30 pm

Gendering Dissent: Of Bodies and Minds, Survival and Opposition under Communism

In her lecture Professor Bucur-Deckard will discuss the relationship between dissent and gender. Dissent, she argues, is coded masculine, and this reflects a misogynist view of political activism. Bucur-Deckard suggests that we might explore anti-politics in the private sphere—in the family, the body (such as controlling one’s sexuality), and in the retreat from politics, which is also a form of opposition. The task of dissidence in the 1980s, she argues, was to advance the cause of civil society; now, perhaps, a movement for political parity (as in Joan Scott’s Parité) will spread to the former Communist nations.

Maria Bucur-Deckard is Associate Professor and John V. Hill Chair in East European History at Indiana University at Bloomington. Her research and teaching interests focus on European history in the modern period, especially social and cultural developments in Eastern Europe, with a special interest in Romania and gender. Her publications include Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania (2002) and Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present, which she co-edited with Nancy Wingfield (2001). Her current book project is entitled “The Violence of Memory and Memory of Violence on the Edge of Europe,” which has already resulted in a number of publications and another book co-edited with Nancy Wingfield, Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (2006). In addition to these specific projects, she is co-editor of the yearbook Aspasia, a new peer-reviewed periodical focusing on women’s and gender history in and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.

Event organizers:
Chad Bryant, Karen Hagemann, and the UNC Graduate Student Group on Gender History

Gender, Experience, and Memory, 18th-20th Centuries: A Transatlantic (Post)Graduate Workshop

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Institute for the Arts and Humanities

Program | Paper Abstracts | Participant Profiles | Sponsors

Workshop Program

Click here for the Workshop Program in pdf format

9:00 - 9:15am | Welcome
IAH University Room

Laurence Hare (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History)
Karen Hagemann (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History)

9:15 - 11:45 am | Session I

1. Gendering Wartime Experiences
IAH Seminar Room

Leighton James (University of York, Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies):
Austrian Soldiers' Experiences during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (abstract)

Catriona Kennedy (University of York, Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies):
John Bull into Battle: Military Masculinity and the British 'armed nation', 1793-1815 (abstract)

Marie-Cécile Thoral (University of York, Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies):
Women in the French Armies during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (abstract)

Comment: Dirk Bönker (Duke University, Dept. of History)
Chair: Laurence Hare (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History)

2. Discourse on Women and Female Experience
IAH University Room

Katrina Mergen-Adams (Duke University, Dept. of English):
"Don't you wonder that I can stand the sight of you?": Anxieties within Nineteenth-Century Women's Romantic Friendships (abstract)

Kelly Kennington (Duke University, Dept. of History):
Slavery and Freedom in Anebellum St. Louis: Women's Experiences in the St. Louis Circuit Court (abstract)

Lisi Lotz (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History):
In Search of Prince Charming: Courtship and Gender Norms in Urban Cuba, 1919-1929 (abstract)

Katherine French-Fuller (Duke Unviversity, Dept. of History):
The Discourse of Gendered Citizenship and Cleanly Comfort: Domestic Appliance Advertisements in Perón's Argentina (abstract)

Comment: Jane Rendall (University of York, Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies)
Chair: Jocelyn Olcott (Duke University, Dept. of History)

1:00 - 3:30pm | Session II

1. Gendered Memories of War
IAH University Room

Julia Osman (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History):
Reviving Sparta: The Gendered Memory of the Seven Years' War and French Participation in the American Revolution (abstract)

Ruth Leiserowitz (Free University of Berlin, Berlin School for Comparative History):
Noble Memories: The War of 1812 in Memoirs of Russian Noble Women (abstract)

Wolfgang Koller (Free University Berlin, Center for French Studies):
Images of Masculinity in German Feature Films on the Napoleonic Wars during the Interwar Period (abstract)

Michelle Cohen (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of Anthropology):
Ambivalent Sanctuary: The Argentine 'Dirty War,' Aushwitz, and Memory Politics (abstract)

Comment: Alex Roland (Duke University, Dept. of History)
Chair: Alan Forrest (University of York, Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies)

2. Gendered Framings of Twentieth-Century Activism
IAH Seminar Room

Felicity Turner (Duke University, Dept. of History):
Redefining African-American Activism: Finding a Place for Helen G. Edmonds (abstract)

Michael Mulvey (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History):
Recording and Retrieving a Gendered Social Type: Jules Vallès, the Jacques Vingtras Trilogy, and May '68 (abstract)

Sarah Summers (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History):
Rethinking the Private Sphere: The West Berlin Kinderläden Movement and Challenges to the Gendered Division of Labor, 1968-1971 (abstract)

Kelly Morrow (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History):
Remembering the Sexual Revolution: The Sexual Liberation Movement at the University of North Carolina, 1969-1973 (abstract)

Comment: Claudia Koonz (Duke University, Dept. of History)
Chair: Chad Bryant (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History)

4:00 - 6:00pm | Session III

Masculine Representations and Men's Experiences
IAH University Room

Maria Schultz (Free University Berlin, Berlin School for Comparative European History):
About Statesmen, Military Leaders, and Struggling Poets: Heroic Masculinity Images in German and Austrian Memoirs of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (abstract)

Lars Peters (Free University of Berlin, Center for French Studies):
Warrior Sailors and Heroic Boys: The Narrative Imagining of Masculinities in Popular British HIstorical Novels on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the Long Nineteenth Century (abstract)

Marko Dumancic (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History):
Reinventing the New Soviet Man: How the Soviet Film Industry Affected Post-Stalinist Attitudes by Remaking the Masculine Ideal, 1956-1968 (abstract)

Comment: Peter Filene (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History)
Chair: Karen Hagemann (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History)

6:15 - 6:45pm | Session IV

Roundtable: Gender, Experiences, and Memory - Methodological Reflections
IAH University Room

Jocelyn Olcott (Duke University, Dept. of History)

Jane Rendall (University of York, Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies)

Chairs: Jennifer Donally and Rachel Martin (UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of History)

In addition to the sponsors of the workshop series this event was also sponsored by:

• Department of History of Duke University
• Graduate School of Duke University
• Graduate School of UNC Chapel Hill
• Institute for the Arts and Humanities of UNC Chapel Hill
• Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York
• Berlin School for Comparative European History and Center for French Studies of the Free University of Berlin

Family, Work, and Welfare in Past and Present: A Transatlantic Workshop

Friday, November 10, 2006 | 5:00pm - 6:30pm | Public Lecture
Institute for the Arts & Humanities, UNC Chapel Hill

Workshop Program (PDF)

Juggling work and family commitments is a major challenge for both parents and governments. Families looking for a work-life balance are deciding whether to have children, when, how many, and who looks after them - and whether to work full- or part-time. Governments potentially can promote family-friendly policies for numerous reasons: reduce poverty and promote child development and family well-being, underpin economic growth, and bolster pension systems. The family-work balance is a highly gendered problem, because till today mainly women are responsible for the care work in the family, despite all the rhetoric about equal sharing of parental obligations. They - and not men - have difficulties to combine a professional career and children. One consequence of this dilemma is for an increasing number of women in the post-industrialized Western states on both sides of the Atlantic the decision to have only one child or no child at all. This has resulted in decreasing birth rates in most European countries and North America. The birthrates in almost all of these countries are below population reproduction and they are so low in some countries, notably the Mediterranean countries, that they represent a major crisis for their pension systems and welfare states as a whole.  Welfare State Policy, Family Policy, Population Policy and Gender Policy are therefore closely related political issues. Only if the governments in the post-industrialized Western welfare states are able to solve the problem of family-work balance their states will have a prosperous future. The workshop aims to analyze this problem in a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective: historians, political scientists and sociologists compare the historical and contemporary development in different Eastern and Western European Countries and North America and discuss the necessary consequences for a future oriented welfare state policy which helps families to combine work and life.