Sonja Dolinsek

There are two claims in Korbel's statement that need to be considered within the broader context of the mid-2020s. The first concerns the analytical value of “gender” in Central European history, or any history. Clearly, gender historians agree on this point, and as Tiffany Florvil notes, it is a no-brainer. Yet Korbel's observation also addresses the institutionalization of gender history in universities, which is and has been the more pressing issue in this region. I believe both aspects deserve separate consideration, even though they are related. While international conferences provide heightened visibility across fields of history, they may or may not reflect a deeper institutionalization process in research, funding, and teaching. In my personal experience, becoming the gender historian who I am today has been deeply tied to what these sorts of conferences provided in developing comparative and theoretical skills at gender analysis. I would not be where I am today without the conferences and workshops where I met European and North American scholars who had been working on the same topic, different yet complementary approaches to how to investigate gender. One such scholar, who I had the honor of working with was the still-much mourned Philippa Hetherington, who did so much to help develop and refine my approach to international histories of trafficking and anti-trafficking. It is through the network she had built with Julia Laite that I was able to connect with other scholars in the field.Footnote ⁴

From the vantage point of my own academic path, these conferences made up for the limited opportunities to learn and exchange ideas about gender history during my studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. The only explicit gender history class I took was on ancient history, and I first encountered Gisela Bock only after coming back from a formative year abroad at Brown University while researching for my master's thesis on commercial sex in West Germany. In 1980, Bock had published a chapter on Nazi prostitution politics for the first German-edited collection published by sex workers themselves.Footnote ⁵ Based on this experience and what I have heard from students and colleagues, I would argue that gender history is still only sparsely and unevenly institutionalized in Central Europe, particularly in Germany, where many history departments still treat it as optional. Scholars who do not primarily focus on gender have yet to find ways to integrate this perspective beyond writing a section or chapter on “women” or adding a few footnotes. Whether students and future researchers have access to courses or supervision in gender history often depends more on the research focus of individual scholars than on explicit and stable faculty positions, curricula, or training expectations.Footnote ⁶

That is not to say that students themselves are not interested in the field. Instead, the problem is that learning opportunities are uneven. In 2024, history students organized the first “Symposium on the State of Gender History in Germany,” and they began connecting students across the country to collectively advocate for stronger inclusion of gender history in university curricula.Footnote ⁷ It is 2026, and still only a small number of professorships in Germany are explicitly dedicated to women's or gender history, even though many historians in broader fields also research and teach gender history. At the same time, gender history classes are often taught by hourly paid adjunct lecturers on precarious terms, which can make sustained teaching and supervision in the field difficult. I, myself, taught in this capacity for many years. Positions held by retired gender historians will remain unfilled, as in Jena (Gisela Mettele) and Magdeburg (Eva Labouvie). Luckily, a position at Freiburg University is being filled again. Magdeburg University, where I teach, is a unique case that we all hope will remain unique. There the history department was disbanded in 2015, and if the plan is followed through to the end, my cohort is the last generation of historians to hold positions there. Furthermore, as of May 2026, the forthcoming state election in Saxony-Anhalt in September is raising fears that for the first time a state will be governed by the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), whose leaders not only wish to prohibit all gender research but also aim to influence what and how history is taught, and what is remembered in museums in order to foster a positive relationship to history and a “self-conscious German identity.”Footnote ⁸ Kurimay's reflections on Hungary below suggest that histories of gender and sexuality can help contest right-wing claims about nation, belonging, and “gender ideology” by making LGBTQ+ lives, feminist struggles, and different forms of belonging visible as part of national and regional histories.

In juxtaposition to these grim facts, more hopeful is indeed the continued vitality of conferences, workshops, and networks such as the Arbeitskreis für Historische Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung (AKHFG), of which I am a member, and the previously DFG-funded network Contemporary Queer Histories in German-speaking Europe. The new director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ), Isabel Heinemann, will continue working on gender and women's history in her new position. However, the political backlash against “gender”—coupled with opposition to queer and women's rights; the return of anti-feminism alongside an AI hype, driven by a techno-utopian ideology rooted in anti-democratic and patriarchal beliefs and a near-religious faith in quantification; and increasing hostility toward the humanities and social sciences—certainly does not help. I believe we should be cautious about narratives of progress and prepare for shrinking spaces of agency.

Tiffany N. Florvil

In the United States, scholars often reference Joan Scott's important “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” 1986 AHR article as an impetus for gender studies, and rightfully so.Footnote ⁹ Yet some scholars of Central European history had already laid the groundwork for women's and gender history. For example, I think of the same scholar Sonja Dolinsek just mentioned, Gisela Bock, especially her 1983 article “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany.”Footnote ¹⁰ Some of these early studies were attentive to racial, ethnic, and religious differences, giving intersectionality space in a European context that often imagined itself as raceless. This is all to say that this rich lineage has led us to Susanne Korbel's assertion “that gender is no longer a niche subject but a vital and productive lens for exploring the full breadth of European history.”

Yet Dolinsek's assessment of Germany seems to support her theory of spottiness. She has offered important details about dynamics in Germany. I have long associated German gender history with a few figures, especially Bock, who passed away in 2025, and powerhouse scholars of German gender history are often based in the United States, including Atina Grossmann, Marion Kaplan, and Dagmar Herzog, to reference a few. In the USA, we also have international conferences such as the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexuality (the Berks), the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA), and the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), that have offered intellectual community and support to many scholars. The latter two conferences have been particularly inclusive and welcoming to minoritized scholars in ways that the Berks has not; but I note that the Berks has new leadership, pushing for change, especially after a series of unsettling racist incidents at its 2023 conference. Additionally, institutions—such as the Freie Universität Berlin, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Universität zu Köln—have programs in gender studies, but this development is not necessarily widespread across history departments. While an academic emphasis on intersectionality has grown in recent years, this approach has not translated across history programs in Germany (or Austria for that matter).Footnote ¹¹ I should note that I am participating in the AKHFG's international conference titled “Women's and Gender History in Times of Challenges to Democracy, Diversity and Responsibility” in Bielefeld in September 2026. This confirms the importance of these international spaces, as Dolinsek noted.

The centrality of gender is not only the case with Central European history but also other geographic areas within our discipline (i.e., American, African, Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, or Western European). Yet scholars of slavery in the fields of African American, African, Caribbean, and Latin American history as well as activist-intellectuals theorizing Black feminism predate the 1980s Central European turn to gender. Consider Martinican intellectuals Paulette and Jane Nardal's creation of the journal La Revue du Monde Noir (The Review of the Black World, 1931), or Trinidadian-born Communist Claudia Jones's 1949 “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”Footnote ¹² These works have been credited with an early focus on intersectionality and were attentive to colonialism and imperialism in addition to gender, race, and class. Additionally, both Frances M. Beal's 1969 “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” and the Combahee River Collective's 1977 “A Black Feminist Statement” acknowledged the importance of gender as a category of analysis and maintained that it was not the primary category of oppression for Black women or Women of Color in the United States.Footnote ¹³ All this work has been both available and has proven influential to some scholars of Central Europe for decades.

With that, I do not believe Central European history is unique; its uniqueness manifests in other ways. In fact, I would argue that women historians of Central European history were at the forefront of these analyses, recognizing gender's importance and offering more holistic accounts by uncovering a variety of historical moments. Moreover, given its location as well as its multicultural and multiracial populations, scholars of Central European history have both intentionally and unintentionally hewed to international conventions, while also rejecting and complicating our understanding of the imbrication of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, religion, and class. They had to advance these studies, especially in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the region called for understanding and tracing examples of the demarcation of differences across time and space.

Anita Kurimay

I would certainly agree that gender and more recently sexuality have become more firmly integrated into the historical scholarship on Central European history. As Tiffany Florvil notes above, gender history has deep roots, with an important group of “powerhouse scholars” focusing on Germany, but the past two decades also saw a robust growth in non-German speaking, East Central European scholarship. The number of books on histories of gender and sexuality published in English as well as in the various East Central European languages is a testament to this.Footnote ¹⁴ Michał Wilczewski provides some highlights of these specific contributions of the scholarship below. To Susanne Korbel's point, from having a few panels at the major conferences on both sides of the Atlantic even a decade ago, these days panels on gender and more recently sexuality are plentiful at most conferences. With that said, I think gender and especially sexuality continue to remain untapped lenses within some of the more “traditional” political and economic histories of the region, especially in the East Central European languages (Slavic-based languages, Hungarian, Romanian, etc.).

While we now know a lot more of the histories of LGBTQ+ people, as well as histories of women and gender, there have been fewer attempts of using gender and sexuality to complicate dominant political and economic histories of Central Europe. In other words, while I think historians of gender and sexuality have paid attention to political and economic histories, the reverse has been less true. I think even just considering gender as an important category of analysis or variable for political and economic histories would provide new avenues of exploration and revisiting some of the accepted narratives. For instance, what would political and economic periodization of local, regional, and national histories look like from a gendered perspective?Footnote ¹⁵ Just in trying to answer that question, I think it is clear we have a lot more opportunities for growth!

Alisha Rankin

Gender is a crucial lens for history in any time period and any place, and norms regarding biological difference and sexuality are central to practically every culture and its history. In that sense, Central Europe is not special. At the same time, there are some pivot points in Central European history in which gender and sexuality played a particularly important role. There are several such examples from my own time period and geography, the German-speaking regions of early modern Europe. The Protestant Reformation raised new questions about women's place in religious movements, and Luther made sexuality an explicit part of his argument for reform.Footnote ¹⁶ Central Europe was also ground zero for the witch trials, in which themes of gender and sexuality took center stage.Footnote ¹⁷

Even beyond these big-ticket events, there are some particularities to Central Europe that make the study of gender especially fruitful. My own work has focused on sixteenth-century aristocratic women who became known and lauded as healers, particularly for their pharmaceutical cures.Footnote ¹⁸ Their story is not uniquely Central European, but the diffuse political map of the Holy Roman Empire created broad epistolary networks that made women's lives and efforts easier to track.Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly, Central European, and especially Protestant, ideas of complementary balance between the sexes gave women some power in their own domains.Footnote ²⁰ Finally, preservation practices since the sixteenth century have left a surprisingly rich documentation of women's lives in German archives. So, while it would be hard to say that Central Europe has a unique role to play in gender history, the region has been crucial to generating arguments for why gender is a “useful category of historical analysis,” per Joan Wallach Scott, or “a vital and productive lens,” as Susanne Korbel put it.Footnote ²¹

Michał J. Wilczewski

If we look at the body of scholarship related to gender and sexuality in Central Europe in the last decade or so, I think it is safe to say that these are no longer niche topics, but now a necessary lens through which we need to understand our region. Every year, as I put together my syllabi for courses on gender and sexuality, I am struck by the dynamism of the field in Central European and East Central European history. This speaks, no doubt, to the tremendous work being done by so many incredible scholars: Katya Motyl, Kamil Karczewski, Dan Healey, Mark Cornwall, Keely Stauter-Halsted, Iris Rachamimov, Małgorzata Fidelis, Anita Kurimay, Agnieszka Kościańska, Mathias Foit, Anna Dobrowolska, Natalia Jarska, Nancy Wingfield, Michaela Appeltová, Katarzyna Person, Barbara Klich-Kluczewska, Dobrochna Kałwa, Anna Hájková, Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz … the list goes on. The work of these historians alone—focusing on homosexuality, new interpretations of the new woman, trans subjectivity, sex work and sexual barter, the sexual revolution behind the Iron Curtain, the role of specialists in gender and sexuality—showcases the enormous breadth of the field. Their work also offers new arrays of methodological innovations available to those of us who study gender and sexuality, for the study of Central Europe and beyond. The intersectionality of this work—focusing as it does on race, gender, class, and nation—is another important contribution of their scholarship. Still, as Tiffany Florvil and Sojna Dolinsek point out later in this forum, there is much work to be done on the relationship between gender and race and ethnicity.

Central Europe, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, experienced enormous volatility and the time is right for us to start thinking about the centrality of gender to those volatile moments: total war, the transition from empire to nation-state, the advent of modernity, mass urbanization, life under totalitarian regimes, and mass death, to name a few. Belinda Davis and Maureen Healy have shown how ordinary women wielded enormous power against their respective states with tremendous success in their books on everyday life in Berlin and Vienna.Footnote ²² Katya Motyl has proven that it is important to look at women's embodied practices to understand their relationship to the city and their own modernity.Footnote ²³ Keely Stauter-Halsted has demonstrated just how central the policing of gender and sexuality was to nation-building.Footnote ²⁴ Anna Hájková has asked us to consider how we might queer the history of the Holocaust.Footnote ²⁵ The transition from empire to nation-state was something that I tried to understand in my work on rural women, thinking about how Polish farmwives understood their place in the new Polish nation-state that arose after WWI. To uncover these stories I approach this from the level of everyday life—thinking about small units, and small moves: what women grew in their kitchen gardens, and the agricultural classes they took in food preparation and childrearing. In doing so, I have tried to feminize rural studies, which at least in Polish historiography has remained up until recently largely the story of men.Footnote ²⁶

Beyond the pathbreaking scholarship our colleagues are producing, I think it is also important for us to remind ourselves that we study a part of the world that gave us the field of sexuality studies. The work of early sexologists in German-speaking lands introduced these new concepts the world over and gave us a language and vocabulary, for better or for worse, to address the various issues that each of us pursues in our intellectual work. Indeed, the progressivism of these early ideas sets our region apart from the “rest” of Europe, and we might remind ourselves that Soviet Russia and Poland decriminalized homosexuality well before other European countries. It seems, then, that Central and Eastern Europe are not the social and cultural backwater that some scholars still think it to be. Still, we might also consider what it means for us to be a part of this intellectual trajectory and lineage. For that matter, what intellectual baggage do we bring as a result of this legacy? And now, as we watch the region that gave us the language of sexuality also works to dismantle it—through right-wing East Central European political parties like Poland's PiS (Law and Justice party), Hungary's Fidesz (Civic Alliance party), Germany's AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland party), and others too—what might our role as scholars of gender and sexuality be? How might the historical memory of sexual liberty be leveraged in current struggles with repressive political systems? What can or should we do in and for this region to persevere through these political entanglements?

Politics—global, regional, local—have made gender a prime battlefield in how people are being encouraged to think about values, economics, and community belonging. What do you see as the role of studying gender in Central Europe in responding to these phenomena? Do you think gender history contributes to writing new histories connecting the regional and local with the global? Does the vagueness of the region “Central Europe” play any part in this within your research?

Sonja Dolinsek

Coming from transnational and global history, I approach “Central Europe” as a space of transfers, connections, and jurisdictional frictions, as well as of projections, imaginaries, and dreams. This is evident in transnational histories of commercial sex, where national frames fail to capture lived experiences or the categories imposed on individuals—categories shaped as much by cross-border coordination as by local and national politics. Campaigns against trafficking in the late nineteenth century and from the 1990s onwards are a case in point.Footnote ²⁷ The study of Central Europe risks reproducing a Eurocentric perspective, yet its transnational entanglements reveal how supposedly “global” ideas are rooted in local contexts, thereby reflecting power relations and global discursive hierarchies. After 1945, a range of actors produced “trafficking” and “prostitution” as objects of knowledge, control, and policing, linking them to border regimes, migration, welfare, and sexual politics. Global gender history demands a sustained engagement between the local and the global.Footnote ²⁸ Migrant sex work, in particular, offers a key lens into the colonial and post-colonial history of Central Europe, through the movement of people who may or may not trade sex; who may or may not be labeled as such; and who may or may not end up in coercive state structures, such as public health supervision, migration detention, workhouses, or prisons. The post-colonial and post-socialist history of migrant sex workers in Central Europe remains unwritten. This is especially the case of people working in German and Austrian brothels, who were and are often imprisoned for violating migration laws.Footnote ²⁹ These histories are (Central) European, yet they point beyond Europe.

This is where my interest in the state and its practices comes in. To some extent, global and transnational history, as well as gender history, have attempted to write histories that transcend the state, focusing on a wide range of actors and their agency. However, when examining history through the lens of commercial sex, the state is omnipresent. It is evident in lawmaking, policing, control, mobility management, the granting and denial of rights, and the determination of citizenship. As Eileen Boris said in her comment to a panel on sex trafficking years ago, histories of commercial sex and trafficking show us “how sex made the state.”Footnote ³⁰ One could easily adapt this to read: “How gender made the state.” However, the state is central to this work not as a monolith, but as a network of infrastructures, including policing, welfare, public health, diplomacy, and knowledge production, each of which operates according to distinct logics, institutional priorities, and administrative cultures.Footnote ³¹ An intersectional lens is necessary in exploring how these networks work: racialized and gendered practices of inclusion and exclusion shaped everyday struggles over belonging, as Florvil's work shows. Global governance becomes legible in local files, and local practices influence global governance, as knowledge flows back “up” into transnational networks, spaces, and problem definitions. This raises questions of agency. How do individuals navigate and resist? How are they shaped by these structures—within, beyond, and across the state?

In the current political climate, it is essential for students and researchers alike to understand how states and state actors have historically exercised power, how they sought to secure a cis-gendered, heteronormative, and often white social order—even when unsuccessful. It is through the study of state institutions and their practices that students can grasp the mechanisms of power and prepare for an uncertain future.

Tiffany N. Florvil

Excuse my informality, but it seems like a no-brainer that gender informs global, regional, and local politics at the macro and micro levels in different temporal and geographic borders. To this effect, individuals are interpellated at the everyday level to accept cis heteronormativity in schools, families, and broader society, and as a result, the fluidity and flexibility of gender are ignored or flattened, as evinced by President Donald Trump's federal actions on gender in 2025 or the Alternative für Deutschland's (AfD) anti-gender and homonationalist discourses. Interestingly, Dagmar Herzog's most recent book unpacks AfD's “sexy racism” and anti-disability stances.Footnote ³² Studying these dynamics sheds light on the changing contours of gender norms, relations, identities, subjectivities, and practices. Yes, gender relations are contingent upon power, and as Michel Foucault long contended, “knowledge is power.” It is not an accident that his 1970s and 1980s volumes on The History of Sexuality proved so significant.Footnote ³³ Therefore, gender is not timeless, natural, neutral, or additive. As an analytic, gender constitutes, challenges, and affirms a variety of socio-political and cultural forms across place and space. Here, I agree with Anita Kurimay's assertion above that “considering gender as an important category of analysis or variable for political and economic histories would provide new avenues of exploration and revisiting some of the accepted narratives.” Moreover, throughout the years, Central Europe's geographically shifting meanings have only added complexity to what belonging and unbelonging mean and how different nation-states organized citizenship along gendered, classed, religious, and racialized lines. So, Sonja Dolinsek is right that these works show us “how gender made the state.”

Although the West and East German states’ lack of due diligence in enforcing their antiracist and gender equitable articles and clauses in the Basic Law of 1949 plays a role, it is not central to my work per se.Footnote ³⁴ In my scholarship, I examine Black Germans’ responses to the state's indifference at the local and federal levels as well as the European Union's limited response to racism and “the crisis” of migration in the 1980s and 1990s. I specifically write on the gender and sexuality of Black Germans in the twentieth-century West, whose values, backgrounds, and community building embodied the interplay of the regional and local with the global. Black Germans used their mobility and ability to cultivate transnational connections to build networks and movements and to survive in majority-white West and East German societies. These African/Black diasporic communities force me to reckon with the idea that the global did not always necessitate travel beyond Germany. This work also impels me to recognize that Black Germans and Black Europeans were never monolithic.

Lastly, one of my main interests is politics in the quotidian or what was referred to as Alltagsgeschichte in the 1980s.Footnote ³⁵ I analyze this history from and/or of below by researching minoritized communities of African descent in Germany and German-speaking regions. This focus on the quotidian enables me to show how the translocal and the transnational shaped Black Germans’ identities, practices, politics, community building, and much more. Thus, the vagueness of the region is less of a concern because Black Germans forged ties with their diasporic kin across the region. In fact, Black Germans’ connections to others (in Austria, Switzerland, Namibia, Tanzania) illustrate the porosity of Central European borders.

Anita Kurimay

I am writing this on the day after the new post-Orbán Hungarian government was formed, and I cannot help but feel optimistic about the role that the discipline of history could play in fostering an engaged collective that believes in democracy and a more inclusive society.Footnote ³⁶ We know how gender and sexuality can be weaponized to aid radical right-wing populist politics, but I do believe that the Hungarian case shows us how spotlighting that LGBTQ+ people have always been part of Hungarian history—in direct contradiction of the false notions that LGBTQ+ people arrived in East Central Europe on the wings of western liberal democracy and capitalism—proved important in reclaiming gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights as central elements of a more inclusive belonging.

As Tiffany Florvil eloquently spells out above, gender and sexual politics shape our lives in fundamental ways. This was true even before they became explicitly politicized over the past two decades in the hands of illiberal right-wing populist parties like Hungary's Fidesz and Poland's PiS. We have bourgeoning scholarship on East Central Europe that showcases how past political systems of our region interacted with ideas of gender and sexuality to construct who could belong in national communities.Footnote ³⁷ While heteronormative patriarchal ideas have been—like in most places—central in determining belonging, there were also times when inclusion within national community was reframed around more inclusive gender and sexual politics, as I have shown in my own work in the context of Hungary, Kateřina Lišková illustrated in the context of state socialist Czechoslovakia, and Kamil Karczewski noted in the context of Poland.Footnote ³⁸ As historians we are trained to refrain from generalizations, but I am going to do it nonetheless. I think the contribution of East Central European gender scholars is that they write histories that on the one hand historicize how social and cultural norms around gender and sexuality were formed and institutionalized, while on the other hand they illuminate the ways in which people of all genders and sexual orientations have navigated and contested norms throughout constantly fluctuating political systems, from multinational empires to liberal nation-states to fascist puppet or occupied states, from communist nation-states to post-socialist/ neo-liberal nation-states, from EU liberal nation-states to sites of growing conservative, authoritarian populism. In so doing gender historians and their scholarship play an important role in problematizing the mythical heteronormative patriarchal past for a more general audience. Their work inherently inspires empathy towards difference and a willingness to engage with the new and the unfamiliar in our present day.

I think if we have learned anything in the digital and social media age, it is how connected the world has become and how easily ideas of all sorts from one place could be applied in a different place. Of course, as historians we have studied and seen how such worldly connections are far from new. As historians of Central Europe have illustrated, and to which many within this forum have alluded, the region has been historically a laboratory of different ideas from East and West.Footnote ³⁹ So historicizing the ways in which ideas about gender and sexuality and their regulation circulated and were implemented in different historical times in Central Europe absolutely serves as case studies that de-center national histories in general. They also provide added focus on how transnational ideas played out on a regional or even local level.

In closing, I would like to circle back to my optimism about Hungary and highlight the role of gender scholars, such as Hadley Renkin and Andrea Pető. These scholars worked tirelessly at debunking right-wing populist myths about the dangers of both “gender ideology” and LGBTQ+ rights.Footnote ⁴⁰ There were obviously many other factors at play in the defeat of Victor Orbán, but by theorizing and demonstrating how anti-LGBTQ+ and gender discriminatory policies and rhetoric were weaponized in the hands of Fidesz scholars of gender and sexuality, they provided important insights to the pro-democracy opposition and myriad concerned Hungarian citizens. I hope that these scholars’ success can be replicated elsewhere.

Alisha Rankin

I very much appreciate Tiffany Florvil's point above that “gender isn't timeless, natural, neutral, or additive.” At the same time, I do think there is value in using past examples of people wrestling with questions of gender to help illuminate our present discussions. I teach a class on gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and students are always surprised by how resonant many of the readings are with their twenty-first-century experiences.

For example, there has long been an interest among early modernists in abortion and the “policing” of women's bodies. Ulinka Rublack wrote an essay on that topic in 1996 for an edited volume on Gender Relations in German History.Footnote ⁴¹ In the last few years, Mary Fissell and Kathleen Crowther have each published a book on abortion and the wide-ranging attempts to control female bodies over the longue durée.Footnote ⁴² Neither of these books focus solely on Central Europe, but German examples form important case studies. My students read Crowther's Policing Pregnant Bodies the last time I taught my class, and they were shocked by how “modern” some of the medieval and early modern discussions seemed. Together, these works (and many others) demonstrate the importance of “deep history” when studying gender—the hyped-up conversations in the current climate have long historical pasts. Per Florvil's point, however, it is also important to tease out the significant differences between “then” and “now” and not to flatten historical timeframes or essentialize problems and concepts. At least in the early modern period, most politically charged questions of gender were pan-European. Central Europe always provided important examples but was far from alone in most instances.

Michał J. Wilczewski

Two years ago, I co-taught a course on homosexuality in Central and Eastern Europe, and it attracted a number of Polish-American students, many of whom come from relatively conservative households. During one class, a student pulled me aside and told me that one of the reasons she was struggling with the material was not necessarily because it was difficult, but because she was “unlearning” so much of what she had been taught throughout her life. This concept of “unlearning” has become now my battle cry for what I want to happen in the classroom and precisely what makes studying gender and sexuality so important to our current political situation. As we all “unlearn,” we threaten the same power structures that seek to regulate us.

The geographic question is an interesting one in the Polish context, I think in part because many of the debates about gender and sexuality are couched in questions of Polish sovereignty and national culture versus some sort of foreign imposition—oftentimes equated with Germany. It is no surprise that in Poland, gender and sexuality have been part of a roaring public debate for over a decade. In fact, in 2013, gender was Poland's “word of the year” and hysteria around gender was so great that a little girl named Marianna came home from school one day and asked her mother if she was “vaccinated against gender,” as one newspaper reported.Footnote ⁴³ On December 29, 2013, priests were instructed to read a letter from Poland's bishops demonizing “gender ideology” during Sunday mass.Footnote ⁴⁴ One bishop even claimed that “the ideology of gender presents a threat worse than Nazism and Communism combined.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Part of the Polish episcopate's claim was that gender was a German imposition and that it was imperative to reject this foreign attempt at controlling Polish culture. This moral panic was often wrapped up in national terms. The looming threat of so-called “gender ideology” was a matter of national sovereignty. In 2026, these debates are still raging. After the European Court of Justice ruled that no EU member states can refuse to recognize same-sex marriages conducted in other parts of the bloc, Polish activists once again claimed that Poland was losing its sovereignty vis-à-vis the European Union.

Maybe we might want to rethink the utility of moral panic as a category of analysis. Frequently, we read the history of gender and sexuality through this lens. That is due in large part because the sources we can access are usually from both historic and contemporary vocal opponents of “gender ideology” i.e., morally panicked activists and social commentators. One of the questions I am currently working through in my own research on pornography in early twentieth-century Poland is “How can we understand desire rather than panic?” That is, the panicked were reacting to what was probably a more powerful desire for sexual exploration. Thinking of desire as the norm, rather than as a taboo, might help us unlearn the panic we associate with gender and sexuality.

Of course, these issues are not specific to Poland or Central Europe. In the United States, colleagues in some states are facing restrictions on how and what they can teach about gender, race, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) in general. It has now reached the level of absurdity—a sad dark comedy—that even Plato is being taken off college syllabi, while gender studies programs are being shuttered.Footnote ⁴⁶ If anything, I feel more emboldened than ever to continue with this work, and we owe it to our colleagues to stand up in support of them.

Women's history, masculinity studies, queer history, LGBTQ+ history, trans history, intersectional history: gender history includes within it so many lenses and so many experiences to be explored and understood more deeply. Do you feel like your work is fed or cornered by all the different angles which gender history now encapsulates? Do you feel that translating these differences in subject matter and approach requires different methods when writing or speaking with North American and Central European audiences?

Sonja Dolinsek

Although histories of sex work can be situated within women's history, masculinity studies, queer history, trans history and intersectional history, they rarely fit neatly into the way these subfields have been organized. Dominique Reill's introductory example above points to a similar methodological problem. Archival traces of “prostitution” rarely map onto commercial sex as we define it today. They can tell histories of intimacy, survival, work, violence, stigma, mobility, policing, self-fashioning, and social belonging. However, sex work is often narrated through the narrow binary of cisgender women providing sexual services to cisgender heterosexual men—both in sources and in most historical research. Even as historians of commercial sex have read the historical record against and along the grain, especially to recover the voices, the agency, and the experience of sex workers, these sources can tell many stories going beyond commercial sex. Unfortunately, present-day debates about consent, choice, and coercion, and conceptual debates about “sex work” or “prostitution” often overshadow other lenses through which commercial sex can be studied and how historical sources offer much richer material than these rather narrow questions may suggest. Historically, sex workers were often portrayed as deviants alongside lesbian women, and yet, this connection is rarely explored. Even if applying both terms to past actors may be an anachronism, I would argue that sex workers were often queer; in the age of self-organizing, they moved in and out of queer, feminist, and other activist communities.Footnote ⁴⁷ The challenge lies in integrating these histories and reinterpreting sources and scholarship to craft inclusive histories of commercial sex in which sex workers are seen as community members with lives and identities beyond their work and the label of “prostitute” or “sex worker.” The problem of categories being forced onto past actors is similar to Rankin's discussion below of pre-modern categories of bodily difference and sexuality. At the same time, the category of “identity” complicates the intersection of histories of sex workers with histories of queer people and queer and feminist activism. Selling sex is not an identity like gender or sexual orientation, which further complicates the inclusion of sex work histories in other histories. Sex work is often omitted from histories in which sex workers could and should have a place. Consequently, it remains compartmentalized as a separate social domain and is silenced as a phenomenon that permeates society as a whole. I cannot say whether this is due to discomfort, respectability politics, the stigma of sex work, or simply a limited understanding of a topic that is indeed quite complex. For me, the question is as much about how sex work histories can attend to all these perspectives as it is about how sex work can be incorporated into all those other histories without threatening the legitimacy or respectability of the people we write about.

Tiffany N. Florvil

I recently finished a forum in German History specifically about new historiographical shifts in queer and LGBTQ+ history, and much like the other scholars in this CEH forum, I find these new developments in queer history extremely generative.Footnote ⁴⁸ In that same forum, Lauren Stokes mentioned gaps, especially concerning bisexuality. Nevertheless, the critical work produced by scholars on queer Central European history, including Jennifer Evans, Christopher Ewing, Andrea Rottmann, Craig Griffiths, Lucie Fremlova, Fatima El-Tayeb, Anita Kurimay, Anna Hájková, Samuel Clowes Huneke, and others, has influenced me; Michał Wilczewski also referenced some of these scholars above.Footnote ⁴⁹ Their work, among others, has advanced queer histories, marking important terrain for gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and “unsilencing the past.”Footnote ⁵⁰ By being attentive to race and racism, Laurie Marhoefer's work has been key in complicating our understanding of Magnus Hirschfeld, a well-known figure in this history. As Anita Kurimay also notes below, Marhoefer's work sheds light on how racist, imperialist, and eugenic ideas coexisted with Hirschfeld's progressive gendered and sexual politics, providing a more holistic exploration of who he was. Additionally, El-Tayeb and Evans have been critical in helping me in my examination of the everyday lives of minoritized communities of Color, who were queer and straight. I foreground their activism and diverse efforts at queering ethnicity, disidentification, worldmaking, and knowledge-making. It has been important for me to focus on queer histories of Color in both East and West Germany.Footnote ⁵¹ Uncovering Black German queer narratives and queer practices helps me illuminate how this community advocated for themselves and other minoritized people by challenging postwar Germany's myth of antiracism and its post-Cold War homonationalism. In a postwar context that included Germany's division in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, my work proves that biological racism and cultural racism coexisted and never disappeared from the national polity (or the continent).

Unfortunately, there is still limited research on Black German queerness and/or the queerness of Germans of Color—while there are certainly some notable exceptions.Footnote ⁵² As a result, I have had to rely on Black Studies, Black Feminist Studies, and Black Queer Studies to find a language that helps me shed light on these neglected, silenced, suppressed, and erased narratives. The works of Fatima El-Tayeb, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Jennifer Nash, Michelle M. Wright, Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, Cathy Cohen, Nadia Ellis, Rinaldo Walcott, Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, and Tina Campt have been invaluable and have given me a degree of fluency that I employ to recover these critical narratives.Footnote ⁵³ I am not entirely sure if some of those Black Studies scholars read Central European studies in a similar fashion. I also must caution myself, though, not to apply concepts and theories onto Black Germans and Black Europeans that do not necessarily fit, and I must try to ensure that queer or queerness does not become so capacious within my own work that it loses its meaning or potency. Ultimately, my work cannot be concerned with all the different angles that constitute contemporary gender history, nor should it be. I also cannot uncover all the narratives of Black Germanness and Black Europeanness. I see my work as a springboard for others to pursue this work, which remains timely and necessary in a moment with a resurgence of global fascism and its insistence on restoring traditional gender roles and norms.

Anita Kurimay

I think the various lenses and different methodological approaches that historians of gender and sexuality use to uncover and write histories is what makes the history of gender and sexuality a particularly vibrant and innovative field. Inherently tied to the politics of archives, the innovative nature of the field and its expanding lenses keep me on my toes, so to speak. This field pushes me to see blind spots in my research and even consider asking different historical questions. I particularly admire Laurie Marhoefer's work in this regard, which shifts from writing macro histories to micro histories, and from thinking through lenses of gender and lesbianism to trans and transnational histories.Footnote ⁵⁴

As Tiffany Florvil and Sonja Dolinsek note above, there are continuing gaps in thinking about gender, especially through race and ethnicity. In terms of East Central Europe,s been less of a scholarship on ethnic minorities, while robust on the pre-WWII period, has been less of a focus in histories of socialist and post-socialist contexts, and this is particularly true in the context of Roma minorities across East Central Europe.Footnote ⁵⁵ At the same time, there are also efforts to fill those gaps. I teach at a liberal arts college without a graduate program, but I recently participated at a symposium on “Research, Teaching and Service in Illiberal Times” at Rutgers University, where I was blown away by the methodological ingenuity of today's graduate students. Their interdisciplinary approaches incorporated queer and trans histories with histories of race, ethnicity, and class in a non-linear chronological sense. Such approaches are indicative of the continuing methodologically innovative nature of gender and sexuality scholars of the region.

Alisha Rankin

Although I work on aristocratic women, intersectional history has always been a crucial aspect of my own research, particularly the way gender intersects with class, age, and religious identity. In that sense, works from queer theory and LGBTQ+ history have made utter sense to me, even though you would not necessarily know that from my research focus. In my work on noblewomen healers, who seemed to transcend expectations of their gender, it was important to keep in mind that power dynamics tilted in their favor in many ways—they were far from subaltern. The more scholarship we have on how to think about gender and sexuality and the power dynamics involved, the more options it gives us for making sense of our own research.

Recent years have brought some very exciting research on LGBTQ+ history in pre-modern Europe that can help inform our present conversations. I would like to highlight in particular Leah DeVun's work on nonbinary sexuality in medieval Europe, which belies the notion that sexual ambiguity is a product of modern woke ideologies. DeVun's masterful and award-winning book, The Shape of Sex, demonstrates convincingly that intersex individuals were central to ideas on defining the “human.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Not only did nonbinary individuals provide a foil that reified binary categories of male/female, strands of medieval Christian theology even posited Adam and Jesus as hermaphrodites.Footnote ⁵⁷ DeVun also gives grim lessons on the harm caused by attempts to flatten out nonbinary gender, in particular efforts by fifteenth-century surgeons to “correct” intersex genitalia, usually to make it masculine.Footnote ⁵⁸ While the specific discourses were much different than today's debates, they still show a longstanding interest in nonbinary sexuality as an epistemological and social category. Similarly, Helmut Puff's work on “female sodomy” in medieval and early modern Germany demonstrates a completely different understanding of same-sex sexuality than our modern categories.Footnote ⁵⁹ These ideas have been extremely generative for my students to wrestle with, and they have helped inform my own approach to thinking about early modern gender categories.

Michał J. Wilczewski

My research into pornography in Poland has been influenced by my professional trajectory, specifically because I was trained as a historian but am part of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. This has helped me consider new interdisciplinary aspects of my work that I likely would not have thought about before. Many of my sources now are literary—seemingly “pornographic” short stories and novels—and I find myself thinking more about literary analysis in my historical work. Studying pornography (which is often impossible to define) helps us uncover so much about people's sexualities. In my own work, I let my interlocuters define what they considered pornographic, and so I have come to embrace novels, humor magazines, cabaret songs and performances, postcards, etc., as potentially pornographic materials—the breadth of this source base lends itself to being analyzed by all of the various angles that fall under the category of gender history. For example, we can study men's crisis of masculinity vis-à-vis their concerns about depictions of the new woman in films and songs, or look at how queer populations are imagined in bawdy publications, or analyze the male gaze toward the women they consume in lewd photographs or stories. As everyone else in this forum has mentioned, I have also found recent scholarship on queer history in the region tremendously informative. Anna Dobrowolska, for example, has called on us to queer heterosexual history and think more deeply about the construction of heterosexuality, much in the same way that we write about the construction of homosexuality.Footnote ⁶⁰ For me, none of these intersectional angles takes away from my work, but only nourishes it.

Which historians inspired your own thinking on gender history when you were first starting to study this topic?

Sonja Dolinsek

A single main inspiration is difficult to pinpoint because I am an eclectic, interdisciplinary reader, and because my point of departure was global rather than regional. One of the first texts that steered me towards gender history and the history of sexuality was Ann Stoler's “Making Empire Respectable.”Footnote ⁶¹ My first encounter with my research topic happened in the anthropology and sociology classroom at Brown University. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas drew my attention to the different moral views sex workers have about their work, and Kay B. Warren had a lasting effect on my interest in international law and international organizations, with an ethnographic angle.Footnote ⁶² Together, they prepared me to complicate international histories of trafficking and histories of sex work by bringing these together and by thinking across the local and the global.

When I first discovered “trafficking,” I went looking for a broad range of histories that seemed to offer some explanatory potential: histories of slavery and post-slavery, including Jim Crow; histories of unfree labor before and after legal reforms that promised change, yet often remained marked by continuities; and histories and social science studies of women's labor migration. To understand my topic, I also drew on scholarship beyond the core historiography of sex work, with scholars like Judith R. Walkowitz having developed a broad range of methodological tools to approach histories of sexuality.Footnote ⁶³ Like Michał Wilczewski below, I consider Walkowitz's work fundamental to the history and historiography of commercial sex, especially for showing how state sources preserve intimate traces of marginalized lives when those lives become subjects of surveillance, regulation, and scandal. Alongside explicitly gender-centered work, I read work on social movements, especially women's and feminist movements, and on NGOs as actors that shaped agendas, problem definitions, and reform strategies. I engaged with histories of international organizations, humanitarianism, and human rights in order to trace how “trafficking” became a contested category of international governance, and how it was translated into national and local policy. Labor history and labor migration scholarship helped me situate commercial sex within broader histories of work, mobility, and coercion, while crime history and policing scholarship sharpened my sense of how states produced gender and sexual order through administrative and legal practices, often under the pressure of faith-based, women's, and feminist organizations that, when it came to commercial sex, called upon state intervention.

Reading in these fields sharpened my sense that legal change is complicated, even if it is presented as easy and straightforward. This is especially the case with contemporary prostitution debates. In histories of commercial sex, legal reform is often explored only up to the moment a law is passed, and this pattern is particularly evident in work on the so-called abolition of “state-regulated prostitution,” where only recently historians, including myself, have begun to study commercial sex after the abolition of regulationism. Such histories have the potential to rethink gender histories across the Iron Curtain and to open up space for transnational perspectives in places where few scholars expected to find them, as in the case of sex tourism to socialist Hungary.Footnote ⁶⁴ For me this shift helps avoid teleological histories of success and keeps focus on the tensions and contradictions that often follow reform promises in practice.

Tiffany N. Florvil

Like all the contributors to this forum, I read widely outside of my field. It is how I have been able to develop as an interdisciplinary scholar. To take it all the way back to my undergrad years, I became interested in gender through my reading of Women of Color and Black feminists such as bell hooks’ Ain't I a Woman, Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa's This Bridge Called My Back, and other volumes.Footnote ⁶⁵ At the time, I was also involved in human rights activism with my campus chapter of Amnesty International, which informed my interests. These works taught me about interlocking systems of oppression in the lives of minoritized communities in the United States. To be sure, this outside reading shaped my perspectives long before I read Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought or learned of Kimberlé Crenshaw's coinage of intersectionality.Footnote ⁶⁶ Beyond feminist studies, I was also drawn to scholarship on the African/Black diaspora in the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. My interest in the Caribbean was due to my upbringing with an immigrant Trinidadian mother from the Anglophone Caribbean; my father was from Haiti, the Francophone Caribbean. While I doubt my mother would have considered herself a feminist, I, nonetheless, saw Black feminism in action through her living example.

It was not until I entered grad school at UW-Madison's well-regarded program in Women and Gender History that I gained additional exposure to historians/scholars of women's and gender studies, such as Gisela Bock, Atina Grossmann, Lynn Hunt, Judith Surkis, Ann Stoler, Heidi Tinsman, Lora Wildenthal, Laura Wexler, and Joan Scott. Yet, I always wondered why I rarely saw myself reflected in the histories, readings, or theories in my (European) Women and Gender History courses. The few times that discussions of Black people or people of color emerged, they always remained outside the European metropole or in the colonies or “peripheries” (i.e., Mrinalini Sinha's Colonial Masculinity and Ann Stoler's Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power), or in relationship to Europeanness, whiteness, colonialism, and empire (i.e., Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and Antoniette Burton's Burdens of History).Footnote ⁶⁷ I was not introduced, for example, to the works and thoughts of Claudia Jones (Britain), Olive Morris (Britain), Paulette and Jeanne Nardal (France/Martinique), Suzanne Césaire (France/Martinique), Tilo Frey (Switzerland/Cameroon), or Gloria Wekker (the Netherlands/Suriname). Additionally, I was often the only Black person in my European history courses at UW-Madison and later at the University of South Carolina-Columbia, where I finished my PhD. Those experiences, which included implicit and explicit forms of racism from graduate student peers and professors, also shaped my interest in the African/Black diaspora in Europe. I consciously sought out those narratives, which felt non-normative or “queer” in comparison to the more traditional or standard narratives, and I taught myself about their theories, practices, and more.

Anita Kurimay

To Sonja Dolinsek's point earlier about the crucial role conferences have (and continue to) play in fostering scholarship, I still vividly remember going to Lviv, Ukraine as a PhD student where Keely Stauter-Halsted and Nancy Wingfield organized a workshop on gender and sexuality in the Habsburg lands and its successor countries. Apart from their own scholarship, which was inspirational, the ways in which they cultivated a budding community of young scholars of gender and sexuality in Central Europe was foundational for me. In addition, Dan Healy and my own professors at Rutgers—particularly Paul Hanebrink, Melissa Feinberg, and Seth Koven—were key figures in shaping my thinking. Finally, Dagmar Herzog's scholarship as well as teaching has and continues to inspire me.

Alisha Rankin

I was introduced to the topic of gender and sexuality during my senior year at Wellesley College, when I took Katharine Park's research seminar on “The Female Body in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine.” I had always been interested in women's history, but I somehow had not managed to take any classes on it to that point. This class blew my mind—the construction of gendered categories, the importance of women's bodies as a topic for medical men—I found it all so fascinating. I ended up writing a research paper using Wolfgang Behringer's collection of German archival sources on witchcraft, so it gave me the first small taste of the kind of sources I could find in early modern archives (without the hurdle of reading the Kurrentschrift, yet).

In graduate school, I was lucky enough to study under Park, who was in the process of writing her Secrets of Women.Footnote ⁶⁸ Her entire oeuvre and her careful attention to sources was an enormous influence on me. I also eagerly read other historians who focused on gender in early modern Europe. Lyndal Roper (especially The Holy Household and Oedipus and the Devil) taught me that the lens of gender can completely change how we see major events in European history.Footnote ⁶⁹ Merry Wiesner-Hanks’ Working Women in Early Modern Germany helped me formulate specific contexts for my sixteenth-century German female healers, while Heide Wunder and Ulinka Rublack gave me a broader perspective on the landscape of early modern gender.Footnote ⁷⁰ Natalie Zemon Davis (especially The Return of Martin Guerre and Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives) showed me how to tell women's stories from the archives.Footnote ⁷¹ Monica Green's 1989 article “Women's Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe” and her book of essays (which included an essay on women's medical reading and writing) helped set me on the path to my PhD topic.Footnote ⁷²

Michał J. Wilczewski

I am sort of a latecomer to gender and sexuality studies. My dissertation was on the everyday lives of Polish farmers in the interwar period and like any good social history dissertation included a chapter on women and girls’ activism (although it was not the focus of the study). My slightly later turn to gender and sexuality studies was influenced in part thanks to a graduate seminar taught by Leslie Page Moch at Michigan State University on gender and women's history, where I was introduced to so many scholars whose work has really proved formative in my own thinking. Of course, Joan Scott's “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis” was a critical text, but I also remember devouring Judith Walkowitz's Prostitution and Victorian Society.Footnote ⁷³ I remember reading Walkowitz's book and finally understanding how we can tell the life stories of marginalized people from various state-driven sources. This idea of the state being interested in collecting such intimate data about ordinary people was also bolstered by Ann Stoler's Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.Footnote ⁷⁴ I also, maybe providentially, started my graduate career just as my PhD advisor, Keely Stauter-Halsted, was in the throes of writing The Devil's Chain.Footnote ⁷⁵ I was lucky to be her research assistant for that book one summer, which turned out to be my first foray into the archives regarding issues of gender and sexuality. I was spoiled in graduate school to work with two scholars of Poland who worked on gender issues and am also beholden to Małgorzata Fidelis's Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland.Footnote ⁷⁶ Reading Angus McClaren's The Trials of Masculinity and Paul Lerner's Hysterical Men were also formative texts in my graduate years.Footnote ⁷⁷ In my own work, I have become increasingly interested in masculinity studies and keep going back to McClaren and Lerner's work. Dan Healey's Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia was both intellectually and personally transformative.Footnote ⁷⁸ I would be remiss if I did not mention Belinda Davis's Home Fires Burning and Maureen Healy's Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire as texts that inspired me to study the history of everyday life and how gender and sexuality are part and parcel of the everyday experience of ordinary people.Footnote ⁷⁹

What archival challenges have you faced in studying issues of gender and sexuality? Have archivists/institutions been the gatekeepers of national moralities who limit historians’ access to certain types of sources in your experiences?

Sonja Dolinsek

Conducting research at the intersection of the “global” and the “local” presents many challenges. The practical obstacles are obvious: archival research takes time and money, particularly when there is little existing scholarship to help trace connections and disconnections. In terms of the archives themselves, there is often a discrepancy between what I know must have occurred in international and local practice, and what the catalogues allow me to locate. Despite working in archives with extensive holdings on local prostitution policy, I have encountered city archives whose catalogues contain no usable entry points, even in places where scandals and public debates indicate sustained administrative attention. It is unclear whether this is a problem of archival practice, where invisibility begins with cataloguing and tagging, or if there is a political agenda behind the lack of archival documents. I have also encountered, though not technically in Central Europe, archives in which the state (France!), notably the Ministry of the Interior, prevented me from accessing files on corrupt police officers relating to cases of commercial sex. Archivists can be extremely helpful, but often my experience was that I helped them discover something about their holdings.

Transnational research has taught me how differently archives work, and how much archival research depends on understanding institutions, bureaucracies, and organizations. I remember my first visit to the archive of the Auswärtiges Amt (German Federal Foreign Office) during the first months of preparing my project proposal. The archivist told me that I needed to understand the administrative and bureaucratic structure of the Auswärtiges Amt in order to find what I was looking for. This proved to be the best archival advice I have received. It helped me navigate collections whose files were rarely titled with “prostitution” and still find some precious needles in haystacks. Working across multiple archives has also shown me how different the archival traces of the same small event can be. One archive preserves correspondence. Another preserves marginal notes, reports, requests, or traces of internal disagreement. Yet another archive might preserve nothing at all or hide it in an unrelated subject file. Multi-archival research is therefore necessary not only to reconstruct several perspectives but also to retrieve a broader documentary record from which more inclusive and multi-perspectival histories can be written.

The greatest challenge in doing transnational and translocal archival research is not necessarily language (although it would be if I were to expand my regional interest to all of Central Europe), but seeing and grasping the heritage and traces of local fragmentation of the past, even as during the period I study, I look at fully formed nation-states. Accounting for local differences often goes beyond the scope of what can be done from the vantage point of global and transnational history, and yet, it might be essential in understanding why local actors act the way they do.

Tiffany N. Florvil

My archival path has been a little different than others. As conducting dissertation research in Germany revealed, there was limited information on the individuals I wanted to study from the 1980s and 1990s at traditional archives, such as the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. Archival silences abound and remain violent, as Alisha Rankin and others in this forum note. Archivists often responded to my German emails dismissively and tersely. As a Black woman studying Europe, traditional German archives were also not the most welcoming or open spaces. I often felt misunderstood and judged for researching Black Germans in the late twentieth century. At the few places that I felt comfortable (i.e. Freie Universität's University Archives), it changed how I viewed and understood my sources. Owing to those dynamics, I found my historical actors in subcultural archives like das feministische Archiv (FFBIZ), Spinnboden, and other libraries. I believe my most important accomplishment was cultivating connections to several Black German queer “quotidian intellectuals” (a term I coined and use throughout my work) in the Afro-German movement of the 1980s and 1990s. I am still in contact with several of them and am lucky to call them dear friends. These women often welcomed me and shared their personal materials. Once again, the everyday or quotidian was not only a methodology for me but also a practice and a form of community building.

In some ways, the field has changed since I first entered grad school in 2004—over twenty years ago—at UW-Madison. Black German and Black European Studies are recognized fields. I would also argue that these fields are institutionalized, evinced by international conferences in Europe and North America as well as through the development of ground-breaking supplementary learning spaces and curriculum interventions including the Black Europe Summer School (BESS) held annually in Amsterdam; the MA Program in Black British History at Goldsmiths University in London; the Intersectional Black European Studies project (InBest) sponsored by the Center for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Technical University Berlin; the RAA Berlin; and Yale University's Center for Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration; as well as the Center for Black European Studies and the Atlantic at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.Footnote ⁸⁰ There are also book series at Louisiana State University (LSU) Press founded and edited by Robin Mitchell, at Peter Lang Press founded and edited by Vanessa D. Plumly and me, and a new Cambridge University Press book series, “Histories of Black Europe,” that I co-founded and co-edited with Kennetta Perry and Olivette Otele. In the past, there was a reluctance on the part of some scholars in “traditional” history departments to advise students’ projects on the African/Black diaspora in Europe. I certainly felt and experienced pushback at UW-Madison but less so at the University of South Carolina. I hope this is ever less the case.

Finally, I mentioned in a 2024 forum in the History of Intellectual Culture that my PhD is not from a prominent institution that trained students in Central European history, and I work at a poor university in the Southwest United States that is also not well-known for (Central) European history.Footnote ⁸¹ Initially, these experiences resulted in limited opportunities, especially in terms of acquiring external funding for my first monograph, Mobilizing Black Germany.Footnote ⁸² While dealing with lots of rejections is par for the course in academia, my rejections were also coupled with incredulity about the importance of Black German history and the viability of my topic on Black German women's activism in the 1980s and 1990s. Similar dynamics also emerged at conferences when I presented on the topic. In fact, there are still some who believe my research area is just a trendy fad that is not truly Central European history.

So, some Europeanists have certainly made it difficult for me, but so have some in the Black German community who do not approve of my work based on my positionality as a Black diasporic scholar from the United States. Some believe that my work on the prominent Black German activist and poet May Ayim, in particular, is inaccurate and misguided, and that I should let Black Germans offer their own perspectives on her. To them I say, I do not feel that I possess Ayim (or her narratives), and I have never expressed a desire to be the only one who writes about her. In fact, I have always stressed the importance of multiple scholars (on both sides of the Atlantic) working on her and exploring how her work changed the lives around her as well as the lives who have followed her. This is all to say that my entire grad school experience and its aftermath have not been a pain-free path. But these experiences have only reinforced my tenacity and resolve.

Anita Kurimay

As everyone else in this forum remarked, there are many hurdles that exist for historians of gender and sexuality thanks to the silences and politics of archiving. I still vividly remember when I was doing research on queer history for my dissertation, neither category existed within the system of organizing sources about the past. What I encountered was a host of silences that surrounded homo and queer sexuality in most of the archives I visited. Of course, a lot has changed, especially thanks to the rapid digitalization of archives (a big shout out to the Arcanum who has been a pioneer in digitizing and making searchable databases). Nonetheless, I would just like to make a distinction between archivists and institutions. While I have found that both of them have been gatekeepers of national moralities (or perhaps it is more accurate to say they have been gatekeepers of historical imagination of gendered and sexual moralities), archivists (unlike institutions) have been also crucial in dismantling such imagination by helping to navigate the workings of institutional archival barriers and red tape. Before the digitalization of archival materials, archivists held the key to major historical discoveries. That was certainly the case for me, and I am forever grateful for their support. Cultivating good relationships with archivists has been not only useful, it has also proven generative in terms of thinking about future historical projects. I just hope that with digitalization, we do not lose these essential archivists who can help navigate the collections, as I experienced.

At the same I also want to acknowledge the increasingly limited funding opportunities for research and getting to the archives in Central Europe, a problem especially besetting new and emerging scholars who are based outside of Europe. In addition to general cuts to humanities research funds, the reality is that using words such as gender, sexuality, or race in countries like the United States could automatically disqualify one's application for federal grant opportunities. Thus, the continuing scholarship on gender and sexuality histories of Central and East Central Europe speaks to the tenacity and resourcefulness of scholars, not to structural support or encouragement.

Alisha Rankin

My archival struggles have come from silences more than categories. What was deemed worth saving from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women is haphazard—sometimes extensive, sometimes empty. My very first archival foray, at the Hessian State Archives in Marburg, yielded a bonanza of letters from one of the noblewomen I was studying, and the archivists there were very patient with my somewhat clueless questions. In Heidelberg, Matthias Miller and Karin Zimmerman happened to be running a major research project on medical manuscripts, and they were instrumental to helping me find female voices that I might have overlooked otherwise. In other cases, I was not so lucky, and entire archives had been destroyed (sometimes as far back as the Thirty Years War). In Dresden, where the archives are generally phenomenal, I became acquainted with the word Kriegsverlust, or “lost due to war.” Nonetheless, with time, I learned that women often show up in places we do not expect—for example, the boxes in the archive in the Vienna Staatsarchiv labeled Ärzte und Arzneiprivilegien (Doctors and Medical Licenses) contain a ton of information on women practitioners and patients. In my experience, finding gender history in the archives requires a lot of patience and a little bit of luck.

Michał J. Wilczewski

Like many of us who study gender and sexuality, I find that the biggest challenge is that there is little saved by traditional state and university archives on such topics. In my own experience, when I explain to archivists that I am working on pornography, they tell me to study prostitution instead. Part of this is because of the way that pornography and prostitution were connected historically, but also because of the organizational structure of archival collections. I have yet to be barred from seeing any materials I have requested (though I know other colleagues have had their requests subject to special scrutiny), but the glances from others sitting nearby in the archives are telling.

The most pushback I have faced regarding my research has come from some who have questioned why I would choose to study the “bad parts” of Polish history instead of telling the story of Poland's exceptionalism. One even cautioned me to “only teach good Polish history.” This all goes back to my point about moral panic above—if we flip the script and think about desire, then we see that none of the issues surrounding gender and sexuality are taboo and “bad” (for lack of a better word), but rather ubiquitous and commonplace.