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Transatlantic Roundtable to Launch the Oxford Handbookof Gender War, and the Western World since 1600

GENDER, WAR, AND CITIZENSHIP
Fritz Stern Seminar in Memory of Sonya O. Rose (1935-2020)

Friday, March 5, 2021

4:00 – 6:00 PM (CET)  /  10 AM – 12:00 PM (EST)  /  Zoom Event

The URL for the Zoom event will be provided after registration. For  registration please click here

This transatlantic roundtable launches the publication of The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 , a comprehensive historical overview of the entangled relationships between gender, war and military culture, and remembers one of its three editors, Sonya O. Rose (1935-2020), who sadly died weeks before the book was published.

The roundtable will focus on the intersection of gender, war and citizenship, which is not only one of the major themes of the Oxford Handbook, but also of Sonya Rose’s work. It starts from her suggestion, to think of citizenship as ‘’a framework that serves as a basis for claims-making.” Citizenship, she wrote, is a discursive framework that enables people to make various political and other claims and shapes political subjectivities that get enacted in the process of claims-making. Deeply marked by gender, race and class, this framework of citizenship produces exclusions—and offers tools to contest these. War often comes with a particularly intense discourse and politics of citizenships, in which claims made by, and on, people get linked to the issue of national survival. The round table will explore the politics of citizenship in the context of military and war and ask how transformations of modern warfare have affected notions of citizenship and gender, and vice versa how historical and changing notions of citizenship and gender shaped military and war.

The participants of the roundtable will explore the wartime politics of citizenship in various historical and geographical contexts, ranging from late eighteenth-century Wars of Revolution and Independence to Word War II. Three sets of questions are central to their exploration:

  1. How have specific gender orders informed specific historical wars and types of war? How have, vice versa, specific historical wars and types of war shaped gender orders and gendered politics of citizenship in particular?
  2. How have wartime politics of citizenship been shaped by the intersection of categories of difference and inequality such as gender, race, and class?
  3. What were the long-term effects on gender orders of wartime politics of citizenship? What explains the persistence or subsiding of wartime reconfigurations of gender and citizenship?

Program

  • Welcome
    Berit Ebert,
    Vice President, American Academy Berlin
    Jan Willem Duyvendak,
    Director, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
  • IntroductionThe Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600—A Global Project
    Karen Hagemann,
    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Commemorative Address: Sonya O. Rose: A Transatlantic Gender Historian
    Susan Grayzel, Utah State University

Roundtable: Gender, War and Citizenship

  • Moderation: Karen Hagemann, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Participants
    • Gender, War and Citizenship
      Thomas Kühne,
      Clark University
    • Masculinity, War and Citizenship in 18th and 19th Century Europe
      Stefan Dudink
      , Radboud University Nijmegen
    • Colonial Soldiers, Empire, and Male Citizenship  in the Age of the World Wars
      Richard Smith, Goldsmiths, University of London
    • The North American Home Front, Race and Citizenship
      Kimberly Jensen, Western Oregon University

In Memory of Sonya O. Rose (1935-2020)

Sonya O. Rose was a professor emerita and former Natalie Zemon Davis Collegiate Professor of History, Sociology, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her main fields of research were modern Britain, gender and labor history, the histories of national identity and citizenship, and the history of sexuality. Her publications include Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (1992); Gender and Class in Modern Europe, edited with Laura L. Frader (1996); Gender, Citizenship and Subjectivities, edited with Kathleen Canning (2002); Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (2003); At Home with the Empire, edited with Catherine Hall (2006); and What Is Gender History? (2010).

Presenters

STEFAN DUDINK teaches gender studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His main field of research is the history of gender and sexuality in modern Western political and military cultures. Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 (Oxford University Press 2020)

KIMBERLY JENSEN is a professor of history and gender studies at Western Oregon University. Her research addresses questions of women, citizenship, and civil liberties in the United States in the period of the First World War and its aftermath, the history of women and medicine, and women’s transnational activism. Author of the Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 (Oxford University Press 2020)

SUSAN R. GRAYZEL is a professor of history at Utah State University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century British and European history with a special focus on the history of war and society, especially gender, women, and war. Author of the Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 (Oxford University Press 2020)

KAREN HAGEMANN is the James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History and an adjunct professor of the curriculum in peace, war, and defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published widely in modern German, European, and transatlantic history, the history of military and war and gender history. Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 (Oxford University Press 2020)

THOMAS KÜHNE is the director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, where he holds the Strassler Chair in Holocaust History. His research focuses on Nazi perpetrators and bystanders, on military cultures, and more broadly on the construction of collective identity through mass violence. Author of the Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 (Oxford University Press 2020)

RICHARD SMITH is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written widely on the experience of West Indian troops in both world wars and the race and gender implications of military service in comparative context. Author of the Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600 (Oxford University Press 2020)

Conveners

Contact

  • Karen Hagemann, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History, email: Hagemann@unc.edu