Central European History Society Presidential Session: Gender History: A Necessary Key to Understanding Central Europe

In this roundtable specialists from North America and Europe will discuss how gender history over the last fifteen years has revolutionized our understandings of oppression, liberation, morality, health, arts, entertainment, industry, and the state in the lands between today’s France and Russia, south of the Baltics and north of the Mediterranean. Some of today’s most cutting-edge practitioners in pre-modern and modern studies will pinpoint new methods of analyzing sources that have set loose ever more exciting insights into why people loved, hated, survived, thrived, and perished under, within, and against gender systems. They will also discuss why these insights have proven so controversial. In direct defiance of the political directives in the United States and Europe ordering scholars to stop focusing on gender, this roundtable will put gender front and center, where it needs to be.