Herder-Institut Marburg: Jaromír Mrňka and Denisa Nešťáková (Web)

Time: 26.-27.08-2025
Venue: Herder-Institut Marburg
Proposals by: 30.04.2025

The Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Institute of the Leibniz Association, in collaboration with the Max Weber Foundation, the German Historical Institute (GHI) Warsaw with its Prague Branch, and the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University in Prague, warmly invites scholars, including early-career researchers such as PhD candidates and postdoctoral fellows, to contribute to the starting-point conference “Queer Histories of East Central Europe in the 20th Century.”
This meeting will serve as an initial platform for participants to conceptualize their research papers. A follow-up event, organized in partnership with the Herder Institute, the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University, and GHI in Prague or Warsaw, will provide an opportunity to present developed papers and contextualize them alongside additional contributions. The outcome of these two events will be a special issue edited by Jaromír Mrňka and Denisa Nešťáková.

Scope and Objectives
While queer histories have been increasingly studied in Western contexts, gender and sexual diversity in East Central Europe remain underexplored, often marginalized by dominant national narratives and shaped by intersecting forces of ideology, repression, and resistance. This event aims to amplify research on the experiences, identities, and activism of LGBTQ+ individuals and communities within the historical and political landscapes of East Central Europe. We wish to examine queer lives and identities in relation to broader socio-political transformations in East Central Europe:
– The late Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Empires: The regulation of gender and sexuality in imperial legal and medical discourses, and the lived experiences of queer individuals in multi-ethnic imperial societies.
– Interwar sexual modernity and nationalisms: The interplay between legal reforms, sexology, and the growth of urban queer subcultures alongside the rise of authoritarian nationalisms and eugenic discourses. Read more … (Web)