Professor Celia Donert will deliver this year's International Women's Day lecture at St Catharine's College. Staff and students are welcome to attend in-person. Members of the public are welcome to join online.
Overview: The end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in a new era of women’s rights as human rights in a world of liberal democracy. Yet women’s rights and ‘gender ideology’ are now at the forefront of the culture wars raging around the world.
Are we facing the ‘endtimes’ of women’s rights?
In this International Women’s Day talk, Professor Donert suggests that history can help us make sense of these questions.
Understanding how and why women’s rights became human rights, in Central Europe and beyond, offers an antidote to the politicised interpretations of the past that are too often used to justify attacks on women’s rights today.
Professor Donert's research focuses on the history of contemporary Europe, particularly Central Europe, communism and state socialism, nationalism and internationalism, human rights, and gender. She is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
Her first book, The Rights of the Roma (Cambridge, 2017), explored the history of Romani struggles for citizenship in 20th century Czechoslovakia. Her next publication, a new history of women's liberation in communist Europe, is forthcoming from HarperCollins.
Professor Donert is currently running a three-year workshop series on The Rise and Fall of Liberal Internationalism, and between 2017-19, she led a research network on the Legacies of the Romani Genocide in Europe since 1945. Her research informed a BBC World Service documentary on The Romani Holocaust: An Unfinished History, which she wrote and presented.
A light lunch and refreshments will be available for those attending in-person before the lecture starts.