Gendering the Cold War East-South Connections (Yulia Gradskova)

Name: Gendering the Cold War East-South Connections (Yulia Gradskova)
Start: 2026-03-05T19:00:00+01:00
Location: Café Restaurant Merkur

Schedule

Thu, 05 Mar, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Café Restaurant Merkur | Wien, WI

The Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna invites to its regular Transformative Salon on March 5, 2026 at 7 PM, this time with Yulia Gradskova (Södertörn University). The Salon will be moderated by Zsófia Lóránd (RECET/University of Vienna) and commented by Ana M. Koželnik (RECET) and Sasha Dimitrova (RECET).
Venue: Café Merkur, Florianigasse 18, 1080 Vienna.
Was it possible for women positioned at the peripheries of the Cold War to influence it? Could they engage in international politics and further the interests of women at large? This Transformative Salon is an attempt of explore mainly forgotten women's gatherings in cities like Tashkent or Havana during 1960s-1980s. While the "togetherness" of those women who were coming to international conferences, seminars or courses in these cities can be seen as unproblematic, women's gatherings partially succeeded in transforming both these places and women involved in this transnational connectivity.
The talk will be followed by a public discussion.
Yulia Gradskova is Associate Professor in History, Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research interests include postsocialist gender history, transnational history and women’s internationalism during the Cold War as well as decolonial perspective on Soviet politics of emancipation of “woman of the East”.
Zsófia Lóránd is Associate Professor at the Department of Contemporary History and RECET at the University of Vienna. Earlier, she was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Faculty of History and Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge, and had held positions at the European University Institute in Florence and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the University of Göttingen. Her book, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia focusing on the intellectual history of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s was published in 2018 and got translated into Croatian in 2020. Whilst living in Hungary, she worked for 8 years as an SOS helpline volunteer and trainer in the field of domestic violence. Currently, she is working as PI on her ERC-funded project HERESSEE “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929 – 2001”.
Sasha Dimitrova holds a MsC in Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology from Maastricht University. She has worked as a research assistant at the Kunsthistorisches Max-Planck-Institut in Florence, with an interest in the ethico-aesthetics of the visual. In her Master’s thesis, she investigated the current everyday usage and discourses around socialist architecture in Bulgaria. Sasha is now part of RECET as a Prae-doc within the project HERESSEE “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929 – 2001”, under the supervision of Dr. Zsófia Lóránd.
Ana M. Koželnik holds a Master's degree in Political Science – Political Theory from the University of Ljubljana and a Master's degree in European Women’s and Gender History from the Central European University. She joined RECET as a doctoral researcher within the doc.funds project “The Dynamics of Change and Logics of Transformation: State, Society, and Economy at Critical Junctures.”
The event will be recorded and uploaded to RECET's YouTube channel
FREE ENTRY! No registration required!
This event is organized in cooperation with the ERC Project HERESSEE.
More information on this event: https://www.recet.at/event-news/events/detail/coming-together-in-tashkent-havana-and-beyond