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Announcement

April 5, Ileana (Voichita) Nachescu, Ph.D., “Beyond Mail Order Brides: Eastern European Women Immigrants in the United States”

Ileana (Voichita) Nachescu, Ph.D.
Teaching Instructor (full-time),
Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University

“Beyond Mail Order Brides:
Eastern European Women Immigrants in the United States”

4:30 to 6 p.m.
53 Washington Square South, Floor 3 E

All are welcome, but please RSVP: Nanette Funk NFunk@brooklyn.cuny.edu or Sonia Jaffe Robbins sjr1991@gmail.com so that we can leave your name at the door.

Dr. Ileana (Voichita) Nachescu is currently Teaching Instructor (full-time) in the Women’s annachescu-headshotd Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University. A former postdoctoral fellow with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University, she is the recipient of an Excellence in Teaching award from the University at Buffalo, where she received her doctorate, and of grants from the Open Society Institute and Central European University.
In 1998, she co-founded the first Women’s Studies Center at her alma mater, the University of the West, Timisoara, Romania. She is currently finishing the monograph titled A Dimension of Humanism: Intellectual Activism and the National Alliance of Black Feminists (1974-1983). This project centers the history of the women’s liberation movement during the long 1970s on the activist and theoretical work of Midwestern African American feminists. Her second book project uses critical whiteness studies and a transnational feminist analysis to explore the experiences of recent Eastern Europeans immigrants dispossessed by their countries’ entrance into the global circuits of neoliberal capitalism after the end of state socialism.
She has chronicled the Romanian LGBTQ movement in both academic writing and journalism. In her creative nonfiction, she attempts to map the fraught and shifting contours of home from an immigrant’s perspective. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is at work on a book-length project, Memoirs of a Socialist Childhood, in which she seeks to explore the articulations of gender, class, and race in a society of equals.

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Announcement

Feb. 22: Dr. Dessie Zagorcheva, “How the Far Right Uses ‘Gender Ideology’ to Fight Equal Rights for Women and Minorities. The Case of Bulgaria”

Dr. Dessie Zagorcheva
Adjunct Assistant Professor, CUNY

“How the Far Right Uses ‘Gender Ideology’ to Fight Equal Rights
for Women and Minorities: The Case of Bulgaria”

4:30 to 6 p.m.
53 Washington Square South, Floor 3 E

All are welcome, but please RSVP to NFunk@brooklyn.cuny.edu so that we can leave your name at the door.

Dr. Dessie Zagorcheva teaches International Politics and American Government at CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, an M.A. from Central European University in Budapest and from Sofia University in Bulgaria. Her main research interests include democracy and democratic backsliding in post-Communist countries; far-right populism; and Russia’s hybrid warfare and disinformation campaigns. She has published in the Journal of Global Security Studies, as well as in International Security, The Journal of Slavic Military Relations, The National Interest, The International Lawyer, and others. She has presented papers at various conferences, including the Association for the Study of Nationalities., and has worked as a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations and the East-West Institute in New York City.

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Announcement

Spring 2018 Workshops, Starting Jan. 26

Welcome to our Spring 2018 workshops,
at NYU’s Center for European & Mediterranean Studies

January 26

Eser Selen
artist and associate professor, Department of Visual Communication,
Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey.
Namalie Jayasinghe
Ph.D., School of International Service at American University;
Women’s Rights Researcher, Oxfam, America

“Mapping Gender Equality and Violence Discourses in Turkey” 


February 16

Catalina Florina Florescu, Ph.D.
Department of English
Pace University

“Back to Shame: A Talk About Reproduction, Violated Rights,
and the ‘Traditional Family’ ”

March 9

Natalie Cornett
Ph.D. candidate in Modern European History
Brandeis

“TV-PiS: The Right Wing Takeover of Polish Media from a Feminist Perspective”


March 26
***PLEASE NOTE: The following meeting is on MONDAY, at 5 P.M.***

Mieke Verloo
professor of Political Science, Comparative Politics, and Inequality Issues,
Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands
director, Multidisciplinary Research Hotspot, Gender and Power in Politics and Management; affiliated with Gender and Diversity Studies

“Understanding Varieties of Opposition to Gender Equality in Europe”

April 27

Olena Nikolayenko
associate professor of political science,
Fordham University

“Women on the Maidan: Gender and the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine”

We meet at the Center for European & Mediterranean Studies, NYU, 53 Washington Square South, 3rd floor, 4:30-6 p.m. (unless otherwise noted). After the workshop, we usually continue the discussion over an informal dinner, and all are welcome.

Categories
Announcement

Call for proposals, Spring 2018

**UPDATED DEADLINE**

GENDER AND TRANSFORMATION: WOMEN IN EUROPE WORKSHOP
NYU CENTER FOR EUROPEAN AND MEDITERRANEAN STUDIES
CALL FOR PAPERS *SPRING 2018*

“Gender and Resistance in Europe”

**DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS:
NOVEMBER 10, 2017**

GENDER and TRANSFORMATION: WOMEN in EUROPE Workshop—a project at New York University with support from the Network of East-West Women—invites speakers to submit proposals for Friday afternoon talks for the Spring semester at the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies.
As usual, we are looking for speakers to discuss gender, sexuality, or women in Europe or Eurasia. For Spring 2018, we are particularly (but not only) interested in speakers addressing
resistance to the many threats to gender equality and gender studies in Europe, such as
— “anti-genderism,”
— attempts to roll back gender equality policy and practice (such as on reproductive rights and gender violence),
— attacks on gender studies,
— gendered attacks on refugees and asylum seekers.
the relation of anti-women/anti-gender and anti-immigrant campaigns,
analysis of these movements, as part of right-wing populism, nationalism, or the global right, addressing such questions as
— How has the right organized its campaigns?
— What is the relation between the anti-immigrant and anti-gender campaigns in EE?
— In what ways has the history of fascism in Europe played a role in these developments?
The workshop’s focus is on the postcommunist countries of East, South, and Central Europe, and the former Soviet Union, including the Baltic countries and Central Asia, and their relationship to Europe and the European Union. We are interested in papers on these issues in western European countries and Turkey as well. We are also interested in comparative accounts.
Recent workshops have included such topics as critique of law faculties in Eastern Europe, women’s protests in Poland against banning abortion completely, and anti-genderism in Germany, Moldova, Armenia, and Russia. Recent speakers have included Dubravka Ugrešić, Katherine Verdery, Hana Havelkova, and Barbara Havelkova.
The workshop is an informal and friendly group of about 20 feminist scholars, activists, and journalists who have been meeting for more than two decades and are knowledgeable about the region. This is the perfect space to present recent theoretical and/or critical work, empirical research, and critical and scholarly reflections on your activism.
We offer a small honorarium. We regret that we cannot cover transportation expenses to New York City or offer assistance for visas or accommodations.

To propose a talk, please e-mail the following to Nanette Funk (Nfunk@brooklyn.cuny.edu) and Sonia Jaffe Robbins (sjr1991@gmail.com):

•  a title for your talk
• an abstract of less than 200 words describing your proposed talk
• a one-page curriculum vitae or resume.
• your schedule clarifying which weeks or months you plan to be in or near New York City and would like to present

All proposals are welcome from the region and experts from the U.S. or elsewhere, activists or scholars. We will get back to you as soon as possible.

Categories
Announcement

March 10: Jennifer Ramme , “Feminist discourse, nationalism, and women’s popular political resistance in Poland today.”

Please join us for our third meeting of the spring semester.

Jennifer Ramme

Ph.D. candidate, European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder,Germany ), Collegium Polonicum, Slubic, Research associate, Faculty of Cultural Studies, European University, Viadrina.  

Talk: “ Feminist discourse, nationalism, and women’s    popular political resistance in Poland today.”

ramme_foto_euv_grey 

In her Ph.D. project Jennifer Ramme conducts research about the feminist movement and conflicting gender orders in Poland.  She applies a spatial and aesthetic perspective on social struggles. She received a master’s degree in multimedial communication from the Art Academy in Poznan (Poland) and works as an artist and photographer as well (https://kulturystka.wordpress.com). One of her teaching projects is about artistic research and artistic methods of protests (https://kunstprotest.wordpress.com).  She has been active in social movements and doing street performance in Poland from the early 90s until the late 2000s. During that time she organized variousfestivals, was active in several feminist initiatives/groups and co-founded a cultural center in Warsaw. Since 2007 she lives in Berlin.

 We meet at the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies,
285 Mercer Street (between Waverly and Washington), 7th floor,
4:30 p.m.–6 p.m.

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Announcement

February 10: Katherine Verdery, “What I Learned from My Secret Police File”

Please join us for our second meeting of the spring semester.

Katherine Verdery
Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology,
the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

“Talk: “What I Learned from My Secret Police File”

katherine-verderySince 1973, Professor Katherine Verdery has conducted field research in Romania, initially emphasizing the political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism. With the changes of 1989, her work shifted to problems of the transformation of socialist systems, specifically the changing property relations in agriculture. From 1993 to 2000 she did fieldwork on this theme in a Transylvanian community; the resulting book, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania, was published by Cornell University Press (2003). She then completed a large collaborative project with Gail Kligman (UCLA) and a number of Romanian scholars on the opposite process, the The resulting book, Peasants Under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962, was published by Princeton University Press (2011).

Professor Verdery’s most recent project takes off from her secret police file, which she received from the Romanian government in 2008.

We meet at the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies,
285 Mercer Street (between Waverly and Washington), 7th floor,
4:30 p.m.–6 p.m.

Categories
Announcement

Friday, April 17: Louise O. Vasvari on Hungarian women’s Holocaust life writing

Louise O. Vasvari,
Professor Emeritus, Stony Brook University,
Comparative  Literature and of Linguistics;
Editor-in-chief, Hungarian Cultural Studies

“Hungarian Women’s Holocaust Life Writing in the Context
of the Nation’s Divided Social Memory, 1944-2014″

vasvari picture 2015.msgLouise O. Vasvári received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. She is professor emerita of comparative literature and of linguistics at Stony Brook University.  She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley; Eötvös Loránd University; the Central European University in Budapest; the University of Connecticut (Storrs); and the Université de Jules Verne (Amiens). Currently she teaches one course yearly in the linguistics department at NYU. She is also affiliated professor in American and English studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She works in medieval studies, historical and sociolinguistics, translation theory, Holocaust studies, and Hungarian studies, all informed by gender theory within a broader framework of comparative cultural studies. Related to the Holocaust, she has published, with Steven Tötösy, Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (2005), Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies (2009), and Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies (2011). She has also published in Hungarian on memoirs of Hungarian women survivors (2009) and on women prisoner doctors (2012). She is editor-in-chief of Hungarian Cultural Studies and currently she is working on a volume titled War and Life Writing (Purdue University Press, 2015).

4:30 – 6 p.m.
at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies

New York University
285 Mercer Street, 7th floor
(between Waverly and Washington Place)
for more information, contact the center at 212-998-3838 or european.studies@nyu.edu

Categories
Announcement

Spring 2015 Schedule

New York University
Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
and the Network of East-West Women

present

Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe

Spring 2015 Workshop Schedule

January 30

Aslihan Aykac, Department of International Relations, Ege University, Izmir, Turkey, and Visiting Scholar, School of Management and Labor Relations,
Rutgers University

“Ideological Roots of Gender Inequality in Turkey”

February 13

Brigid M. O’Keeffe, Assistant Professor of History, Brooklyn College

“Pornography or Authenticity?
The Politics of Romani Women’s Performance on the Early Soviet Stage”

March 6

Ia Iashvili, Associate Professor of Human Geography and director of the American Studies Center, Akaki Tsereteli State University, Kutaisi, Georgia

“Split Families and Family Members Left Behind: Migration from Georgia”

April 17

Louise O. Vasvári, Professor Emeritus, Stony Brook University, Comparative  Literature and of Linguistics; Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Cultural Studies

Hungarian Women’s Holocaust Life Writing
in the Context of Hungary’s Divided Social Memory, 1944-2014”

May 8

Ermira Danaj, Ph.D. candidate, Center for the Understanding of Social Processes,
University of Neuchatel;  women’s rights activist

“Exploring Practices and Strategies of Women in the Post-1990 Albanian Migration”