is an intellectual historian of feminism in post-WWII state-socialist Eastern Europe. Currently, she is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Faculty of History and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge. Her new project focuses on the heritage of interwar feminism in post-WWII Hungary, Yugoslavia and the GDR.
Her book, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) was published in 2018 and got translated into Croatian in 2020. For 8 years, she worked as an SOS helpline volunteer and trainer in the field of domestic violence.
The euphoria of anti-fascists from WWII-occupied countries, meeting at international events, was a short-lived reprieve from oppression. Hungarian socialist groups, bringing women from all social classes together, went from publishing starstruck articles to testifying in Stalinist show trials, their solidarity forced into betrayal.
From introducing feminist literature on the pages of a semi-pornographic magazine to challenging the self-image of the socialist state of Yugoslavia: journalist and novelist Slavenka Drakulić has broken ground in many fields in her native tongue even before rising to international renown.
The widespread fear from the label of radical feminism has blurred the interpretation of pre-1989 women’s movements. A generational clash further complicates the process of remembrance. The superficiality of post-feminism and gender mainstreaming threatens to erase the struggles of yet another feminist generation.