Eloisa Betti
is a junior assistant professor (rtd/a) at the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies of the University of Padua. In 2014–2015 she was a Visiting Fellow at the School of Advanced Study (University of London), and in 2015–2016 she was awarded the eurias Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. In 2020, she earned the Italian National Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor of Modern History. Her recent English-language publications include “Unexpected Alliances: Italian Women’s Struggles for Equal Pay, 1940s–1960s,” in E. Boris, S. Zimmermann, D. Hoehtker (eds.), Women’s ilo. Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present (Brill 2018), and Precarious Workers. History of Debates, Political Mobilization, and Labor Reforms in Italy (ceu Press 2022).
Masha Bratishcheva
is a historian and current PhD student at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. She investigates the problematic of the Russian feminist movement in the nineteenth century. She is particularly interested in the issues of women’s underrepresentation in the historical narrative of the Russian Empire and feminist critics of the historical approach to descriptions of the Russian feminist movement. She researches the limits of women’s political agency and studies the strategies of women’s horizontal organizations.
Jan A. Burek
is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Warsaw and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the framework of the project “The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts” at the University College London. His research interests lie at the intersection of labour and gender history, the history of communism and communist parties in Central Europe, and micro-historical methodologies. His recent publications include “History Seems Different from the Shop Floor. A Micro-Historical Challenge to Established Caesurae in the History of 20th-Century Poland: Transwar Continuities in Żyrardów,” in L. George and J. McGlynn (eds.), Rethinking Period Boundaries. New Approaches to Continuity and Discontinuity in Modern European History and Culture (De Gruyter 2022).
is a postdoctoral researcher at Central European University in Vienna, Austria. Her research as part of the zarah project concerns educational programs developed for urban and rural women in Turkey and transnationally. She earned her PhD degree in Comparative Gender Studies from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She recently published a monograph, authored collaboratively with Mia Liinason and Olga Sasunkevich, entitled Feminist and lgbti+ Activism in Russia, Scandinavia, and Turkey: Transnationalizing Spaces of Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan 2022).
Daria Dyakonova
teaches in the Department of International Relations of the International Institute in Geneva, Switzerland and is also Head of research at the same institution. She earned her PhD degree in history at the University of Montreal, Canada. Her thesis examined the transnational ties of young Canadian Communists during the interwar period. In Montreal, she participated in several research projects funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (sshrc) that investigated left-wing international networks, Soviet foreign policy, and Soviet-Western relations during the interwar period. In 2019–2020, Dr. Dyakonova was a Visiting Fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, where she worked on her latest project, which has resulted in the publication, co-edited with Michael Taber, The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920–1922. Proceedings, Resolutions, and Reports (Brill 2023).
Mátyás Erdélyi
was a postdoctoral researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives in Prague and a research fellow at the Institute of History, Research Centre for Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd Research Network in Hungary, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Central European University in the zarah team and at the University of Vienna. Erdélyi specializes in the history of the Habsburg Monarchy in the long nineteenth century; in particular, he has researched and published on the history of private clerks in banking and insurance (PhD in 2019 at Central European University in Budapest), the history of statistical thinking, public administration, professional education in trade and management, and educational mobility in the late Habsburg Monarchy. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on the social history of private clerks in Budapest, Prague, and Vienna between 1880 and 1910.
is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, and a research fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History, Budapest, Hungary. She earned her PhD degree in 2020. She studies the development of the Austrian and Hungarian bourgeois-liberal, feminist movements, their international connections, and their press activities from the 1890s until the end of the 1940s. Her first book on this topic was published in 2021 (in Hungarian) as Cultural Mission or Propaganda? Feminist Journals and Their Readers in Vienna and Budapest (Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont 2021). Most recently, she has been researching the history of the Hungarian Feminists’ Association during the interwar period and the life and career of Rosika Schwimmer, especially Schwimmer’s work in the women’s and peace movements and her international network of contacts.
Eric Fure-Slocum
is a historian of twentieth-century U.S. labour and urban history. He is the author of Contesting the Postwar City: Working-Class and Growth Politics in 1940s Milwaukee (Cambridge University Press 2013) and co-editor of both Civic Labors: Scholar Activism and Working-Class Studies (University of Illinois Press 2016) and Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming 2024). His current projects include a book on American egalitarianism in 1944, viewed from the neighborhood, city, and national levels. An associate professor (non-tenure-track) of history at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he has also taught as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oslo, Norway (2003) and West University of Timişoara, Romania (2022). He serves on the executive board of the Organization of American Historians.
Alexandra Ghiț
is a postdoctoral research affiliate at Central European University. As member of the zarah team, she researches women’s labour activism in the tobacco industry in Romania in the twentieth century. She holds a PhD degree in Comparative Gender Studies from Central European University Budapest (2020). Her publications include “Professionals’ and Amateurs’ Pasts: A Decolonizing Reading of Post-War Romanian Histories of Gendered Interwar Activism,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 25, no. 1 (2018).
Maren Hachmeister
is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at tu Dresden. Her research interests include the social
Veronika Helfert
is a postdoctoral research affiliate at Central European University. As member of the zarah team, she studies the entangled history of women’s labour activism in Austria and transnationally from 1945 to the 1980s. She holds a PhD degree in history from the University of Vienna. She won several prizes for her dissertation, including the Käthe Leichter Award. Her most recent book (in German) is “Women, Stand up!” A Women’s and Gender History of the Austrian Revolution and Council Movement, 1916–1924 (Unipress 2021).
Natalia Jarska
PhD, is a historian, an Assistant Professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History (Polish Academy of Sciences), and a postdoctoral fellow in “Expert Turn. Expertise in Authoritarian Societies. Human sciences in the Socialist countries of East-Central Europe” (Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences). Her research interests include women’s and gender history, the history of sexuality, and labour history. Recent publications include the articles “Women’s Work and Men: Generational and Class Dimensions of Men’s Resistance to Women’s Paid Employment in State-Socialist Poland (1956–1980),” Aspasia. The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern History, vol. 15 (2021) and “Female Breadwinners in State Socialism: The Value of Women’s Work for Wages in Post-Stalinist Poland” Contemporary European History 28, no. 1 (2019).
Marie Láníková
is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Masaryk University in Brno. She studies the socialist women’s movement, postwar Czechoslovak women’s organizations and their relationship to expertise, their approaches to domestic work, and the problem of the “second shift,” as well as women’s agency under state socialism. She received a ba in Gender Studies and Social Anthropology and an ma in Sociology from Masaryk University. She has published in Český
Jean-Pierre Liotard-Vogt
obtained a master’s degree in Hungarian studies at the Oriental Studies School (inalco) in Paris. He received an award in 2018 from the Association of Friends of the Hungarian Institute in Paris for his master thesis on the history of Hungarian social democracy in Budapest before 1914. He is currently a doctoral student at the Department of History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (ehess). His dissertation focuses on the political life of the Hungarian social democrat Anna Kéthly (1889–1976). His research interests include the history of Hungarian social democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, women’s history, women in labour unions, and transnationalism. He has also published a research paper on Leo Frankel, the French-Hungarian Communard.
Ivelina Masheva
is a postdoctoral research affiliate at Central European University and a researcher at the Institute for Historical Studies – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. As a member of the zarah team, she studies women workers and trade unions in Bulgaria and internationally from the 1920s to the 1940s. She holds a PhD degree in History from the University of Sofia (2015). She is a contributor and a co-editor, together with Martin Löhnig, of the recently published book Commercial Law in Southeastern Europe. Legislation and Jurisdiction from Tanzimat Times until the Eve of the Great War (Böhlau Verlag 2022).
Denisa Nešťáková
is a Research Associate at Comenius University in Bratislava with her postdoctoral project “Privileged to Be in Hell. Jewish Women in the Sereď Camp,” which is supported by the Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies. She was a research associate at the Herder Institute, where she focused on the history of family planning in Slovakia, which resulted in the forthcoming monograph: Be Fruitful and Multiply: Slovakia’s Family Planning under Three Regimes (1918–1965). Her research interests include Holocaust studies, gender studies, and twentieth-century Central-East European history. She is one of the editors of the volume on gender and the Holocaust entitled If This Is a Woman. Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust (Academic Studies
Sophia Polek
is working on her dissertation on journalistic reporting in the Imperial Russian mass-circulation press from 1895 to 1912 and also serves as a Research Assistant in the Department of History at the University of Basel. Her research is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She holds an ma in Eastern European History and Slavonic Literary Studies from the University of Basel with exchange studies undertaken at the University of Glasgow and the Higher School of Economics Moscow. Her key interests are the cultural history of journalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Russian Empire, the Russian Revolution of 1905, applied narratology, and feminist criticism.
Zhanna Popova
is a postdoctoral researcher at Central European University. As part of the zarah team, she works on women’s labour activism in the lands of partitioned Poland, interwar Poland, and internationally. Prior to coming to Vienna, she was a doctoral researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and defended her PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 2019. She recently published “Exiles, Convicts and Deportees as Migrants: Northern Eurasia, Nineteenth-Twentieth Centuries,” in Marcelo Borges and Madeline Y. Hsu (eds.), The Cambridge History of Global Migrations, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press 2023).
Büṣra Satı
has recently earned her PhD degree from the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University. Her dissertation, titled “Feeding the Workers. Food, Corporations, and Welfare in 20th Century America,” explores the history of corporate welfare programs and food-related employee provisions in the United States. Her research interests include women’s labour history and food studies. She received her ba degree in Sociology at Middle East Technical University and her ma in the matilda European Master in Women’s and Gender History program at Central European University. Her ma thesis entitled “Gendering Trade Unions. Women in tekstil, 1965–1980” explores the union activism of women textile workers and discusses the changing gender politics of labour organizations in Turkey. She published a related article “Working-Class Women, Gender, and Union Politics in Turkey, 1965–1980,” International Labor and Working-Class History 100, no. 3 (2021).
is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College. Her teaching and research explore global documentary, Eastern and Central European cinema, ecocinema, and women’s cinema. She is co-editor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe. From Communism to Capitalism (Berghahn Books 2023), and The New Russian Documentary. Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press). She holds a PhD degree in Film and Media Studies and Comparative Literature from Yale University.
Georg Spitaler
is a researcher at the Austrian Labour History Society (Verein für Geschichte der ArbeiterInnenbewegung, vga) in Vienna. He held a postdoctoral position at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna (2008–2014) and is a lecturer at the same place. His publications include books, edited volumes, and articles on labour history, political theory, cultural studies, and the political aspects of sports. He is a co-editor (together with Rob McFarland and Ingo Zechner) of The Red Vienna Sourcebook (Camden House 2020) (published also in German as Das Rote Wien. Schlüsseltexte der Zweiten Wiener Moderne 1919–1934). He co-curated the exhibition Das Rote Wien 1919–1934 at Wien Museum musa (2019–2020), as well as the exhibition catalogue (in German) Red Vienna 1919–1934. Ideas, Debates, Practice (Birkhäuser 2019).
Jelena Tešija
is a doctoral researcher at Central European University. As member of the zarah team, she researches women’s labour activism within the co-operative movement in and beyond the Yugoslav lands from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. She holds two master’s degrees, one in Journalism from the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Zagreb and one in Gender Studies from Central European University in Budapest. She published “‘Millions of Working Housewives:’ the International Co-operative Women’s Guild and Household Labour in the Interwar Period” Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 31, no. 3 (2023).
Eszter Varsa
is a postdoctoral researcher at Central European University. As member of the zarah team, she studies the history of agrarian socialism in Hungary from a gendered perspective during the period between the 1890s and the 1920s. She holds a PhD degree in Comparative Gender Studies from Central European University in Budapest (2011). Her recently published monograph is entitled
Johanna Wolf
is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt am Main on the project “Non-state Law of the Economy” since 2019. Her dissertation – which she completed in Global Studies at the University of Leipzig and which was awarded with the Walter-Markov-Prize in 2017 – focuses on the global challenges of metal trade unions in the shipbuilding industry and was published (in German) as Assurances of Friendship. Transnational Pathways of Metal Trade Unionists in the Shipbuilding Industry, 1950–1980 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018). From September 2020 to June 2021, she was a Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, where she worked on the mobility of communist trade union actors since 1945. This research was funded by a research grant from the German Research Foundation (dfg).
Susan Zimmermann
is a historian of labour and gender politics and movements in the international context and in Hungary and Austria. Her most recent monograph (in German) is Women’s Politics and Men’s Trade Unionism. International Gender Politics, Women iftu-trade Unionists and the Labour and Women’s Movements of the Interwar Period (Löcker Verlag 2021). Together with Eloisa Betti, Leda Papastefanaki and Marica Tolomelli she co-edited Women, Work, and Activism. Chapters of an Inclusive History of Labor in the Long Twentieth Century (ceu Press 2022). She holds the European Research Council Grant “Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, from the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century” (Acronym: zarah, 2020–2025).