Abstract: This talk is based on the collaborative OSUN network course taught together with David Feldman (Birkbeck College, University of London), Yair Wallach (School of African and Oriental Studies), Merle Williams and Adam Levin (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). It addresses topics that are of urgent global importance in our era of continuing discrimination, forced migration, socially sanctioned violence – and war. It promotes new teaching and thinking about the relationships among four distinct, but overlapping, historical, cultural, and political phenomena: antisemitism, the Holocaust, colonialism, and gender. Each of these terms becomes a lens through which to examine exclusion, prejudice, discrimination, race, and hate in their historical and contemporary manifestations. These questions are widely discussed in their individual contexts, with antisemitism and the Holocaust treated as conceptually and historically distinct from forms of racism rooted in colonial legacies. This talk aims to map how this OSUN course reframes vital discussions (such as investigations of the Holocaust and gender discrimination) that currently take place in parallel or are even pursued in an antagonistic manner.
Bio: Andrea Pető is a historian and a Professor at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, a Research Affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest, and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her works on gender, politics, Holocaust, and war have been translated into 23 languages. In 2018 she was awarded the 2018 All European Academies (ALLEA) Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values and the 2022 University of Oslo Human Rights Award. She is Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. Recent publications include: The Women of the Arrow Cross Party. Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (Palgrave, Macmillan, 2020) and Forgotten Massacre: Budapest 1944 (DeGruyter, 2021).
The lecture will take place on Monday, 4 December at 17.30 in the Auditorium and will be streamed on Zoom.
Registration for both on-site and online participation is mandatory. Attendance in-person will be limited to CEU community members only.