Seven specialists in Central and East Central European history have come together to discuss the state of the field of gender studies in their subfields. Much emphasis is placed on thinking about how the current political situation in the 2020s is affecting what historians do, what is taught in the classroom, and how it relates to the larger political environment. This forum is based on the 2026 American Historical Association (AHA) Central European History Society (CEHS) presidential panel of the same name. The contributors collaborated to produce a forum accessible to non-specialists and for use in the classroom. It serves as a resource for anyone interested in the historiography of gender studies for the region, which includes the lands east of France and west of Russia.

This article explores the entanglements between educational and confessional history in early modern Europe, focusing on the conflict between the University of Vienna and the Jesuit College in 1553–1623. As part of a broader trend of confrontations between “old” universities and Jesuit colleges, the Viennese case stands out for two key reasons: 1) the university’s remarkable institutional resilience and 2) the overt confessional antagonism between the two institutions. The article examines both institutional and religious dimensions of the contest, highlighting the ambiguous role of the Habsburg rulers in its development. A strong commitment to the ideals of academic privileges and autonomy made the university resistant to Jesuit infiltration and led to the longest educational rivalry in Central Europe. Confronted with the Jesuit-led re-Catholicization efforts, the university remained strikingly persistent in preserving its confessionally neutral stance. This conflict offers a new perspective on complex confessional dynamics in the Habsburg monarchy.

The article examines the Slovenization of public space in the Habsburg crownland of Gorizia and Gradisca from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. As in other ethnically mixed regions of the empire, public space became a contested arena shaped by the rise of nationalism, with competing national groups seeking to inscribe their ideologies onto the urban landscape. The Slovene national movement aimed to assert its identity and political aspirations through symbolic spatial interventions. However, owing to the specific circumstances of the Slovene community in the region—characterized by a predominantly rural population and internal divisions between liberal and conservative currents—Slovene spatial politics exhibited distinctive features compared to other nationally driven spatial strategies. The article traces the gradual assertion of a Slovene presence in local public space, from the first nationally inspired monument erected in 1898 to the construction of the national hall in the center of the provincial capital, Gorizia.

After the First World War, the Versailles Peace Treaty obliged the German Reich to far-reaching military disarmament. Pacifist journalists who reported in the 1920s and early 1930s on illegal rearmament measures by the Reichswehr were threatened with legal action by the Reichsgericht, Germany’s supreme court, on charges of journalistic treason. Contemporary opponents of the proceedings, as well as modern research, accused the Reichsgericht of siding with the Reichswehr against the republican governments in its ruling in favor of the Reichswehr’s illegal rearmament. However, the rulings of the Reichsgericht were not solely based on legal provisions; they also invoked the official guidelines of German foreign policy. The article demonstrates that the Foreign Office exerted far greater influence than the Reichswehr Ministry for most of the period. It thereby highlights the tension between law and politics in political criminal trials and nuances the so-called “crisis of confidence” in the Weimar judiciary.

Through the examination of a criminal trial that took place in Vienna in January and February 1968, this article explores postwar Austria’s treatment of pornography. It argues that the 1950 law criminalizing pornography in Austria was a product of the Second Republic’s consensus-driven politics and emphasis on international obligations under a 1923 international treaty against obscenity. The spectacle of the presiding judge berating defendants on trial in 1968 sparked public outrage and calls for legal reform. The Austrian government strove to liberalize the country’s obscenity laws but soon abandoned these efforts. Through a comparison to Denmark and West Germany, the article suggests that the failure of legislative reform in Austria resulted from an emphasis on political consensus and on international law, as well as the terms of the debate over pornography after the 1968 trial, focused on restraining judicial power rather than artistic liberties and free speech.