Gender History 2026

Thursday, 10 September 2026, 5.00–6.30 pm: World Café on terms, concepts and current issues in women’s and gender history

Marthe Becker (Bielefeld): Gender and Ancient History

Hosts: Anna Kötter & Jannis Sgorzaly

Room: X-E0-230

Gender has long been established as a central category of analysis in ancient history and has been significantly refined through intersectional approaches. Ancient texts not only address normative orders and sanction deviant behaviour, but also present gender as a relational and performative category that, depending on the context, can be stabilised, instrumentalised or subverted. This is displayed, for example, in the distinctive bodily practices of Roman senators, who staged their masculinities by consciously distinguishing themselves from one another (Meister 2012), or in late antique ascetics who sought to transcend their physically encoded gender (Taylor 2001). Against this backdrop, Jan Meister and Seraina Ruprecht identify three central fields of gender-historical research in classical history in ‘Femininity – Power – Masculinity’: 1. the influence of antiquity on modern gender relations, 2. the intersectionality of gender and status in relation to female agency, and 3. the construction(s) of masculinity(ies) and their relationship to power (Meister/Ruprecht 2023, p. 26). These aspects are intended to form the framework for the discussion on the productive connection between gender history and classical history.

Biographical note:

Marthe Becker was an academic co-worker at Bielefeld University from 2021 to 2026; she completed her (doctoral) thesis on ethnography and church history as part of the SFB 1288: Practices of Comparison. Since July 2026, she has been working at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, where she is researching debt relations between the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.

Christina Benninghaus (Bielefeld): Room for critical fabulation? Writing Gender History (engl.)

Hosts: Liva Clausen & Otto Hannover

Room: X-E0-228

Archives are not neutral. They mirror the power, the economic resources and the priorities and aims of those individuals and institutions compiling and keeping them. They continue to shape the source materials and the knowledge available to historians. Digitalisation helps. It makes the creation and storage of counter archives much easier and allows searching through vernacular materials hitherto almost impossible to navigate. But whatever strategies we employ, the histories of those who were displaced, poor and powerless and those who did well to hide, are almost impossible to reconstruct. Reduced to a name or even to a number – two slave girls sold at such and such price – their experiences and emotions, their culture, their struggles, relationships and world views often escape our attempts at reconstruction, even if we try very hard to read “against the grain”. The literary scholar Saidiya Hartman experiments with what she calls “critical fabulation” to write the history of slavery and its aftermath. She endeavours to simultaneously mark the vast gaps in our historical knowledge and imaginatively fill in some of them. Historians might find such attempts at “speculative narration” not only irritating but outright dangerous. Can they ever be justified?

Biographical note:

Christina Benninghaus is an academic co-worker at the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies (IZG) at Bielefeld University. She specialises in the history of gender in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research focuses on: the history of reproduction, visual history, and approaches, concepts and methods in gender history

Sebastian Bischoff (Bielefeld), Moritz Y. Meier (Bielefeld), Andreas Neumann (Jena), Lisa Oelmayer (Jena), Aurelia Rohrmann: The Future of Gender History in Higher Education

Room: X-E0-226

Following a few brief presentations on the topic of the event, the focus will be on a discussion with those attending: What is the shared assessment of the current situation? Where are there differing developments across the German-speaking world? Where is university-based gender history currently under particular pressure? What can we learn from past initiatives aimed at preserving gender history professorial titles – such as the protest and lecture theatre occupation at the University of Jena – and how can these interventions be linked to current efforts? We would like to discuss this with the participants.

Biographical note:

Sebastian Bischoff is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Contemporary History at Bielefeld University, where he leads the DFG research project ‘The German Right and the “Sexual Revolution”’. He studied Modern History, Sociology and Philosophy in Heidelberg, at the Humboldt University (HU) and the Free University (FU) of Berlin, and completed his PhD at the University of Paderborn with a thesis entitled ‘Belgium as a War Aim: Debates on Annexation and National Enemy Stereotypes in the German Public Sphere, 1914–1918’. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7897-8442, sebastian.bischoff@uni-bielefeld.de

Moritz Y. Meier is a PhD candidate in the Department of Contemporary History at Bielefeld University and is the academic coordinator of the Bielefeld Centre for Contemporary History (currently being established). His research focuses on the social history of National Socialism, the history of historiography and historical theory, the critique of anti-Semitism, and Critical Theory. He studied history, social sciences and educational sciences at the universities of Bielefeld and Groningen. https://orcid.org/0009-0001-2857-583, moritz.meier@uni-bielefeld.de

Andreas Neumann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Centre for Religion and Education at the University of Jena, where he is conducting research as part of a DFG project on concepts of Protestant pedagogy in the Weimar Republic. Following his doctoral thesis on the admission of women to higher education in the German Empire (“Scholarship and Gender”), he examined the political context of academic honours at the University of Jena in the 20th century and subsequently conducted a study at the Chair of Gender History on the relationship between masculinity and Protestant religiosity. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7938-5294, andreas.neumann@uni-jena.de

Lisa Oelmayer is a doctoral fellow of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and was an academic co-worker at the Chair of Gender History at the University of Jena. Her research focuses on the history of emotions and gender in the early GDR. She is also a member of the doctoral candidates’ and students’ section of the AKHFGS. She studied history and Philosophy in Tübingen, Aix-en-Provence and Jena.https://orcid.org/ 0009-0008-9512-6066, lisa-marie.oelmayer@uni-jena.de

Aurelia Rohrmann is a PhD candidate in contemporary history (University of Fribourg, Switzerland; Humboldt University of Berlin) and her research project focuses on anti-feminism on the radical right, examining its transnational networks, practices and discourses in Germany and Switzerland from 1970 to 1990. After completing a Bachelor’s degree at the University of Basel, she went on to study for a Master’s degree in ‘20th-Century History and Politics’ at the University of Jena. https://orcid.org/0009-0000-8784-8650, aurelia.rohrmann@unifr.ch

Kai* Brust (Berlin): Trans History

Hosts: Svenja Castrup & Felix Wehebrink

Room: X-E0-220

Trans history has been gaining in relevance in recent years, both in public discourse and in historical research. Examples of this include recent ZDF documentaries, discussions surrounding the Stolpersteine, and its emergence in mainstream historical publications such as *Geschichte und Gesellschaft*.

Trans history can help to challenge established historical chronologies and raises questions typical of historical scholarship: What terms do we use for historical (gender-nonconforming) subjects, and how do we write and speak about them? Ethical questions arise regarding gendering and naming, as well as the deconstruction of cis-normative power structures in historical sources and in historical narratives and discourses. Such questions underscore the need for gender-sensitive methods in trans history.

With the aim of making gender-nonconforming lives from the past visible, Kai* Brust explores these questions. In doing so, dey draws on professional experience working with hundreds of files and other sources from the German-speaking world of the 20th century.

Biographical note:

Kai* Brust is a PhD candidate at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute (FU Berlin) working on the project ‘LGBTIQ* Movements as Agents of Democratisation’, which focuses on trans activism and movements in the Federal Republic of Germany. Dey holds a Bachelor’s degree in History and Political Science and a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Research on Anti-Semitism. Previously, dey worked as a freelance historian on various educational and exhibition projects focusing on queer and trans history.

Sonja Dolinsek (Magdeburg): Global Gender History (engl.)

Hosts: Lisa Hellriegel & Emma Teworte

Room: X-E0-224

Global gender history remains underdeveloped within historical scholarship in the German-speaking world. While research on colonial and imperial entanglements, the circulation of knowledge, migration, international organizations, and transnational movements has demonstrated the analytical benefits of linking gender and global history, this connection is still underdeveloped in both directions. Global history in Germany has only selectively engaged with the concepts and methods of gender history, while gender historians have only partially explored the role of global processes in producing and transforming gender relations. During the discussion, participants will reflect on the contribution of existing scholarship and pinpoint themes, actors, regions, and historical periods that have not been sufficiently explored. They will also consider how closer engagement with other subfields might advance this work. The discussion will evaluate the current state of research and identify new questions arising from the integration of gender into global history and global perspectives into gender history.

Biographical note:

Sonja Dolinsek is a Research Associate in 20th-Century and Contemporary History at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. Her current research focuses on the transnational politics of sex work and anti-trafficking in the second half of the 20th century.

Jane Freeland (London): Feminism in Contemporary Gender History (engl.)

Hosts: Nike Harmening & Laura Schäfer

Room: X-E0-216

Feminism has long played a central role in histories of gender. Indeed, feminist politics and methods lie at the heart of the histories of women and gender with their goal of addressing gender imbalances and hierarchies within academia and in history writing. At a time when feminisms are increasingly under attack, from without and within, this panel argues that feminist methods are more important than ever. But it also poses challenges. What is feminism(s) and what are feminist methods? And how do we employ them at a time of both backlash and mainstreaming?

And what of feminism as historical subject? An ambivalent term, feminism emerged in the late 18th century, but has evolved and pluralised since then. How can we use it as an analytical lens in the past? And how do we tell histories of feminism that are attentive to the embeddedness of some strands of feminism in hierarchies of class, race, gender and ability? This question is rendered more complex for writing contemporary histories of feminisms, when activists are still alive and often still politically active.

Lastly, this panel explores what can be gained from a deeper engagement with feminism in contemporary gender history. What can it reveal about ongoing inequalities within the discipline, and how can it illuminate ways forward for a more gender just world?

Biographical note:

Jane Freeland is a Lecturer in Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on the history of gender and feminism in modern Germany. Her book, *Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism in Divided Berlin, 1968–2002*, was published by OUP in 2022. She is currently developing a new project on reproductive care in Europe from the 1970s to the present.

Benno Gammerl (Florenz): Methods of Queer Research (engl.)

Hosts: Svenja Schillings & Melvin Wilde

Room: X-E0-214

My research focuses on queer history, seeking to strengthen intersectional perspectives. I am particularly interested in intimate and emotional aspects. To explore these, I use oral history methods and engage in participatory research that enables activists and other stakeholders to contribute to the knowledge-building process. I would very much like to discuss which methodological approaches are best suited to exploring queer topics. What are their respective strengths and challenges?

Whilst addressing these questions, participants are welcome to share insights from their own research practice. I am currently exploring how people in multicultural intimate relationships dealt with the potential differences between them that arose from having been socialised within different sexual regimes. How were cultural differences navigated on an everyday level in 20th-century Germany? How were different ‘sexual cultures’ discussed in the media and by organisations representing ‘bicultural couples and families’? I also wish to learn more about how mobility shaped change in the spheres of sex, marriage and family.

I look forward to talking with you about these and other topics, and to discussing various ideas on how to conduct research into intersectional topics in a participatory manner.

Biographical note:

Benno Gammerl is a professor of the history of gender and sexuality at the EUI in Florence. Intersectionality and difference, exclusion and participation lie at the heart of his research into European history from the 19th to the 21st century. Queerness in Germany, mobility and intimacy, the Habsburg Empire and the British Empire, oral history and the history of emotions are among the topics Gammerl explores. Most recently, he co-edited the *Handbuch queere Zeitgeschichten*.

Levke Harders (Innsbruck): Migration & Gender (Discussion in English or/and German)

Hosts: Sarah Manegold & Lola Wienberg

Room: X-E0-212

What does migration research have to do with women’s and gender history? And why? At the World Café, we will explore key concepts in migration research that draw on approaches from gender history. The starting point is gender as a category of analysis: How did gendered life courses shape mobility and (non-)belonging? The discussion will also focus on applying intersectionality—a concept of Black feminist theory—to (European) migration historiog-raphy, that is, examining the interconnections between gender, class, race, sexuality, age, and religion. Drawing on critical migration studies, the workshop will focus on the agency of migrants while also making border and migration regimes productive frameworks for histor-ical scholarship. The World Café will also address practical questions regarding sources and methods (including first-person accounts, queer and non-binary perspectives, and gaps in visibility). People at all career stages are invited—please bring your questions and a willing-ness to collaboratively refine our conceptual framework.

Biographische Notiz:

Levke Harders Levke Harders is a professor of gender history at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Her research and teaching focus on gender, migration, the history of higher edu-cation, gender theory, and the theory of biography. She studied German literature, history and gender studies. In 2011, she received the doctoral degree for her dissertation on Ameri-can Studies. Levke Harders is blogging about migration, gender history, and other fields of research in her weblog ‘Migration and Belonging’ (https://belonging.hypotheses.org). For more information and publications see: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5004-6686.

Anne Kwaschik (Konstanz): Approaching Gender History through Knowledge (Discussion in English or/and German)

Hosts: Josephine Herrmann & Nathalie Hermelingmeier

Room: X-E0-210

From “Free Science from Ideology – End the Funding of Gender Research” to “Gender Ideology – Avert Dangers to Education, Science and Culture,” AfD motions in the Bundestag deny gender research scientific legitimacy and label it ideology. Starting from these attacks, we ask: Why is knowledge about women and gender so threatening, and what does its history reveal? Knowledge has been central to women’s and gender history from the start. From the nineteenth-century “woman question” through women’s movements to the institutionalisation of women’s and gender studies, struggles over gender have concerned who produces knowledge, what counts as evidence and who defines social reality. Gender history has thus always been a history of knowledge. A history-of-knowledge approach makes this relationship explicit and reflexive: it traces how feminist knowledge is produced, institutionalised and contested, while scrutinising its own assumptions. What does this perspective add? What can this history teach us about attacks on its scientific status? How can the field respond without retreating into a defensive narrative?

Discussion in English or/and German.

Biographical note:

Anne Kwaschik is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz. Her research lies at the intersection of the history of knowledge, gender history and intellectual history, with a focus on Western Europe from a global perspective. She works on feminist knowledge, colonial sciences and the early forms of socialism from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Kristin Skottki (Bayreuth): Mediävistische Intersektionalitätsforschung

Hosts: Michelle Fichtner & Anna-Lea Krampe

Room: X-E0-208

Intersectionality has long been established in gender studies – yet medieval studies remain on the periphery of this debate, even though the Middle Ages in particular offer crucial insights. Gender, race and class, as categories of difference in human society, are not modern inventions, but already shaped social relations in antiquity and the Middle Ages. What is crucial is how they were differently defined, charged with meaning and intertwined within their respective historical contexts. My central example is the racialisation of Jewish otherness in the late Middle Ages: a historical turning point at which religious and social attributions became increasingly intertwined with ‘race’, a category of difference grounded in biology. In my view, this demonstrates that it is not the categories of difference themselves that are variable, but rather their historically specific interweaving and the meanings ascribed to them. I wish to discuss how this variability can be reconstructed in a methodologically controlled manner and what consequences this might have for contemporary research on intersectionality.

Biographical note:

Kristin Skottki is a professor of Medieval History at the University of Bayreuth. Her current main research project examines the history and memory of an alleged desecration of the Eucharist by Jews in the small town of Sternberg in Mecklenburg in 1492. Her work is characterised by intersectional, global historical and historiographical perspectives.

Katie Sutton (Canberra): History of Sexualities (engl.)

Hosts: Enno Holloch & Maximilian Wulff

Room: X-E0-206

In what ways does gender history intersect with the history of sexuality, and how should we disentangle these categories? To what extent is this field still deeply entangled with the power dynamics of modern Western institutions of law, medicine and psychiatry, and how is new scholarship moving us beyond these frameworks? At the World Café, participants at all stages of their careers are warmly welcome to bring topics and questions from their current research and guide our collective discussion. We will reflect on whose stories have been told and whose have not, and how sex and gender always intersect with experiences shaped by race, class, ability and other factors. We will consider questions such as how to think about shifting sex-gender norms and identities across different historical periods; working with different types of sources; and how to approach histories of sexuality not merely through frameworks of oppression, but in more positive ways. If time permits, we will also explore some recent Black feminist, trans and/or neuroqueer theory to identify ways of approaching our sources with a perspective of ethical attention and care.

Biographical note:

Katie Sutton (she/they) is an Associate Professor of German and Gender Studies at the Australian National University, specialising in queer and trans German studies, the history of sexuality and the medical humanities. Her books include *Sexuality in Modern German History* (Bloomsbury, 2023) and *Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-Speaking World, 1890s–1930s* (Michigan, 2019).

Xenia von Tippelskirch (Frankfurt am Main): Inequality in the Early Modern Period

Hosts: Carlotta Mühlhardt & Maya Reuscher

Room: X-E0-215

Johanna Wolf (Frankfurt am Main): Work, the Economy, Gender

Hosts: Sara Gojowczyk & Amelie Winter

Room: X-E0-213

Women and queer people remain significantly under-represented in the history of work and business. Their activities in these male-dominated fields are marginalised both historically and historiographically, and tend to be portrayed as peripheral or exceptional. Instead of taking their roles as trade unionists, entrepreneurs and workers seriously, the white male industrial worker or entrepreneur continues to serve as the benchmark against which other groups are measured. The focus tends to be on gender gaps compared to men or on the question of whether women and queer people ‘go on strike like men’, rather than on their own forms of conflict, issues and strategies. Research into the gender history of work must critically question this benchmark and recognise women and queer people as constitutive elements of labour, trade union and business history. It should analyse regimes of work valuation – that is, the question of what counts as valuable or productive work – from a historical and gender-critical perspective, not only within a national context but explicitly also within transnational and international frameworks. Alison E. Woodward’s concept of ‘velvet triangles’ serves as a point of inspiration here; it illustrates how women forge networks beyond their immediate sphere of activity and harness them for political intervention – a perspective that can enrich research. We intend to explore this and other feminist approaches in the discussion at the World Café.

Biographical note:

Dr Johanna Wolf is a historian at the Max Planck Institute for the History and Theory of Law in Frankfurt am Main, specialising in labour and gender history. She investigates the role of women in international trade unions, for example in debates on equal pay within the World Federation of Trade Unions and the establishment of the Women’s Committee within the European Trade Union Confederation, and is co-editor of the volume *Gender Pay Gap: On the Value and Worthlessness of Labour in History and the Present (2023).

Heidrun Zettelbauer (Graz): Women’s* history as an unfinished task? Perspectives from cultural and gender theory

Hosts: Theo Flint & Franziska Ludewig

Room: X-E0-218

The shift towards gender history, queer history or postcolonial theory does not automatically undo the marginalisation of women* as agents* of history. Even though the focus has shifted from viewing women as a homogeneous group towards relational, discursive and intersectional analyses, women* are still treated as marginal figures or dealt with in ‘special chapters’ in many historical (overview) studies and textbooks. As a cultural and gender historian, I interpret the term ‘woman’ as a category of attribution, perception and positionality. Building on Joan W. Scott’s critique—that ‘gender’ is not a substitute for ‘woman’—the question arises as to why this insight does not render women’s* history superfluous, but rather underscores its very necessity. Rather than retroactively fitting female* actors* into hegemonic historical narratives, the focus is on how gendered orders, constructions of the body, regimes of emotion, political concepts and forms of knowledge structured women’s* ways of life throughout history and opened up scope for action. The aim of our thematic roundtable is to explore women’s* history as a ‘productively unfinished’ task that can continue to unsettle, challenge and transform the ‘malestream’ of historical scholarship.

Biographical note:

Heidrun Zettelbauer is a university professor of cultural and gender history and the coordinator of the doctoral programme in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Graz. Her research focuses on the cultural and gender history of the modern era and contemporary history, with a particular emphasis on Austria and Central Europe, autobiography and biography, the body, women’s movements, war and nationalism.