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ZARAH Circular No. 7
27 September 2025

Dear colleagues, dear friends,
before the new academic year moves into full swing, we launch our ZARAH Circular No. 7, which is also the last one.
The project period of ZARAH – including the additional sixth year (which gave us more time yet no additional resources, which is o.k.) – comes to an end on 31 January 2026. Attuned to this state of the project cycle, in Circular No. 7 we list what we have concluded most recently, what we are still working on, and where we are going. (The ZARAH website gives and will continue to give an overall outlook of ZARAH’s outputs and achievements).
We are very pleased to share the news that we have completed two more major steps on our path through the overall ZARAH work plan, which began in February 2020.
Done!
Our massive collaborative team monograph has been published on 26 August 2025.
While ZARAH’s earlier book publication, Through the Prism of Work, was a classical edited volume collecting research chapters authored by non-ZARAH colleagues and complementary to what the ZARAH team has been doing, the new publication Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond: A new transnational history, is a monograph written collectively by the ZARAH team.
As Dorothy Sue Cobble writes in the book’s foreword: “The volume’s achievements stem in part from an innovative collaborative approach that required each author to go beyond their ‘country’ or ‘field’ expertise. It is a model for how a large-scale academic research project can foster individual growth while also crafting a joint intellectual product that truly advances knowledge.”
It was indeed quite demanding, on various levels (only some of this is mentioned in the book…), to produce this ten-author monograph. The book provides ten thematic chapters, each of which transgresses borders, examines women’s labour activism on different scales, and unpacks how power and hierarchy impacted on the activisms studied. There are somewhat unusual elements in the volume that might attract special attention. We provide a “Vocabulary of Concepts and Terminology” for global labour history, sensitive to gender inequality and global inequality; we explain the maybe unexpected threefold arrangement of the book in three concise book part introductions; and we constructed a “Chronology in Pictures”, which collects 31 illustrations covering the period from the 1880s to the 1980s, all complemented by extended captions, to condense some of the book into an illustrated short story.
And there is more to discover!
Done!
On 26 September, we launched Women’s Labour Activism at labouractivism.eu – a public history website showcasing the stories of women activists from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe who fought to improve women’s position in the world of work. The project amplifies their contributions to the struggle for a fairer society.
Built on more than five years of academic research, the website uses the possibilities of digital storytelling to present women’s life stories, activism and networks in an accessible, interconnected and richly illustrated way. It is designed for students discovering new topics, activists drawing inspiration from past struggles, teachers and scholars seeking classroom resources and digital historians looking for innovative examples. Our goal is for the ZARAH Public History Website to become a reliable and enriching English-language resource for anyone interested in women’s history, labour activism and the region.
The website was conceptualized, written and curated by team member Zhanna Popova, with the full support of the ZARAH team. The design and development were carried out by Luca Gőczey (UI, Studio STOKI), Áron Fridvalszky (UX), and József Bóné (development).
Ongoing
Our public history book, written by Emily Gioielli – whose work we commissioned – with the contribution of the whole ZARAH team, will be published in 2026.
The volume which comes with lively thematic chapters, many illustrations, source excerpts and text boxes is entitled Striking Activism: Women’s Labour Struggles in Eastern Europe and Beyond in the Long 20th Century. A Public History Volume in 13 Languages (CEU Press, forthcoming 2026).
The book will be published in 13 languages and Open Access. Single-language print editions will be available on demand.
Susan and Emily shared the complex management tasks around the translation process, involving 12 translators and 13 specialist readers, which is nearing completion. A system of directing the typesetters who won’t speak the translation languages had to be developed. Parallel revision tasks were carried out in all 13 different languages and then synchronized in all editions. A special reference and bibliography system was developed, which in each edition unburdens the text from references in many other languages and still gives all references correctly. Translators and specialist readers also faced a complex task, including the creative engagement with terminology difficult to translate, multiple languages and rounds of corrections and so on. We are grateful for their commitment.
Here is the title of the ZARAH public history volume in its 13 translations; the list will be included in each edition:
Activism frapant: Eforturile femeilor în domeniul muncii în (și dincolo de) Europa de Est în lungul secol XX. Un volum de istorie publică în 13 limbi
Çarpıcı Aktivizm: Uzun 20. Yüzyılda Doğu Avrupa ve Ötesinde Kadınların Emek Mücadeleleri. Herkes İçin 13 Dilde Bir Tarih Kitabı
Megdöbbentő mozgalmak: A nőmunkások küzdelmei Kelet-Európában és azon túl a hosszú 20. században. Köztörténeti kötet 13 nyelven
Nápadný aktivismus: Pracovní zápasy žen ve východní Evropě i mimo ni v dlouhém 20. století. Svazek veřejné historie ve 13 jazycích
Nápadný aktivizmus: Ženské pracovné zápasy vo východnej Európe a za jej hranicami v dlhom 20. storočí. Zväzok verejných dejín v 13 jazykoch
Незаборавни активизам: радничке борбе жена у Источној Европи и шире у дугом 20. веку. Јавна историја на 13 језика
Osupljiv aktivizem: delavski boji žensk v Vzhodni Evropi in drugod v dolgem 20. stoletju. Živa zgodovina v 13 jezikih
Striking Activism: Women’s Labour Struggles in Eastern Europe and Beyond in the Long 20th Century. A Public History Volume in 13 Languages
Uderzający aktywizm. Walki pracownicze kobiet w Europie Wschodniej i poza nią w długim wieku XX. Historia publiczna w 13 językach 
Verblüffender Aktivismus: Die Arbeitskämpfe von Frauen in Osteuropa und anderswo im langen 20. Jahrhundert. Lebendige Geschichte in 13 Sprachen
Въздействащ активизъм: Борбите на жените за трудови права в Източна Европа и отвъд нея през дългия 20-ти век. Сборник по публична история на 13 езика
Вражаючий активізм: боротьба жінок за трудові права в Східній Європі та за її межами у довгому XX столітті. Публічна історія тринадцятьма мовами
Zadivljujući aktivizam: radničke borbe žena u Istočnoj Europi i šire u dugom 20. stoljeću. Javna povijest na 13 jezika
In the foreword of Striking Activism, Emily – expressing the hopes of all of us in the ZARAH team – writes: “This book speaks to all of those who are concerned about the poor working and living conditions of people, past and present. It wants to encourage labour activists, community groups, educators, trade unionists, and rebels of all generations to make a difference.”
Moving on
While all ZARAH team members are still engaged with completing various smaller tasks in the project, team members have moved towards new adventures. Here is a brief summary of what everybody is undertaking at present, mostly beyond the ZARAH project. The short descriptions speak volumes about varieties, vagaries and opportunities of academic and professional lives in our insecure times. They also showcase intellectual and scholarly energy and commitment of the ZARAH team.
Alexandra Ghiț is looking forward to receiving the author copies of her first solo monograph, Welfare Work without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest (De Gruyter Brill, fall 2025, Open Access). She is postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded project “History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929-2001” (HERESSEE, PI: Zsófia Lóránd) at the University of Vienna. Recently, she taught the interdisciplinary course “The Gender of Labor Struggle Past and Present” at the same university. She has won a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship and will be based at GWZO Leipzig from January 2026, working on RECKON, her project on gender and postwar reconstruction in Romania in 1944-1948. Among others, she is working with Veronika Helfert on an article on East-West trade union exchanges in the early 1990s.
Eszter Varsa is based at CEU in Vienna, where she is conducting research on the history of agrarian women’s labour activism in Hungary during the first half of the twentieth century, a project she began as part of ZARAH and now aims to develop into a book. She is also a researcher in the FEMEX project, “Women Experts and the Production of Feminist Knowledge in Post-War Central and Eastern Europe (1945-1989),” at the Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. In this role, she focuses on the contributions of Romani women to work-related expertise and knowledge production.
Ivelina Masheva is based in Sofia, where she is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Historical Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Since 2024, she has also served as an adjunct lecturer in the Faculty of History at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski,” where she teaches an MA course on 19th-century Ottoman Bulgaria. In the academic year 2025/2026, she is a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia, working on a project examining gender wage inequalities in the Bulgarian industry during the first half of the 20th century. She is also preparing to complete and publish an article on her research on women and labour courts in interwar Bulgaria. In autumn 2026, she plans to start revising her dissertation – which investigated how Ottoman commercial law reforms reshaped the business activities of Bulgarian merchants during the Tanzimat period – for publication as a book (in Bulgarian).
Jelena Tešija is focused on writing up her dissertation on the gender and labour history of the International Co-operative Women’s Guild (1921-1963). She has completed her Marietta Blau Grant stay at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana. From September to December 2025, she will be an external associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. During this time, she will continue to work on her dissertation with the hope of finalizing it in early 2026. In parallel, she has been thinking of developing postdoctoral projects related to the gender history of the Yugoslav and international labour movements.
József Bóné (Josh) serves as the software and database developer on the project. In addition to creating visually engaging webpages and storytelling sites, he is dedicated to advancing the long-term preservation, accessibility and visibility of digital materials. As head of the IT Unit at the Blinken OSA Archivum, he is responsible for overseeing and shaping the archives’ IT strategy, as well as developing its institutional catalog, website and archival management system. With a strong commitment to technological innovation, he actively explores new frameworks and tools and contributes to projects beyond his immediate field of expertise.
Lukas Neissl continues to work as ZARAH Program Manager. Furthermore, he has also taken up a position in research management at the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), a leading Austrian archive and research institution in the fields of resistance and persecution in the Nazi period, persecution of Nazi crimes and right-wing extremism since 1945.
Mátyás Erdélyi is a researcher in the FWF-funded project “Uses of Civil Justice in Central Europe, 1895-1938” at the Institute for Austrian Historical Research at the University of Vienna (from October 2025). He is currently working on a book manuscript, based on his dissertation, that analyzes the social history of bank clerks in the Habsburg Monarchy and the successor states from the 1880s until the early 1920s. The book uses the angle of bank clerks to better understand social change and its connections to financial capitalism in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, he is preparing a research article that focuses on the labour activism of textile workers in interwar Czechoslovakia.
Olga Gnydiuk is a researcher in the project “Ukrainian History Global Initiative,” where she examines population emigration, experience, practices and networks of emigrants from the territories of Ukraine in the 20th century. She is also preparing publications on the activism of women trade unionists from Eastern Europe associated with the World Federation of Trade Unions between the 1940s and the 1980s, based on research that she started within the framework of the ZARAH project. In addition, she is working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, which explores humanitarianism, childcare and resettlement policies and practices developed by international social workers for Ukrainian refugee children in the aftermath of World War II.
Selin Çağatay took on a consultancy job at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s Regional Office for Cooperation and Peace in Europe (FES ROCPE) in Vienna and conducted a gendered analysis of “Security Radar 2025,” a survey by FES ROCPE on public attitudes towards foreign policy and security questions. Her report “Security matters: Gendered geopolitics of war, militarization and global uncertainty” will be published in September 2025. Now based in Berlin, she is currently designing her new research project on the role of transnational expert networks in the making of education policies around women’s work in Turkey and more broadly in the “developing world” during the two UN Development Decades, the 1960s-1970s. She is also working on a book manuscript based on her doctoral dissertation on Kemalist feminism and Kemalist women’s activism in modern Turkey.
Susan Zimmermann is still busy to ensure to finalization of the ZARAH public history volume Striking Activism. In the academic year 2025/2026, she is on sabbatical working on a book manuscript, co-authored with Dorothy Sue Cobble, on the transnational political biography of Toni (Tony) Sender, a left labour activist and intellectual, during her decades in the United States and at the United Nations. Zimmermann has also worked to ensure a lively future of the CEU Press book series “Work and Labor – Transdisciplinary Studies for the 21st Century”.
Veronika Helfert was Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna, has recently concluded the research project (funded by Stadt Wien Kultur) “‘Politics in the Saucepan’: The Federation of Democratic Women Austria between the Fronts of the Cold War” and is preparing the publication of the results in form of an article. In addition, she is working – together with Alexandra Ghiț – on the ICFTU and 1990s trade unionism and is developing a research project on the networks and spheres of agency of the women functionaries of the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions.
Zhanna Popova has been responsible for the ZARAH public history website, launched at labouractivism.eu. After finishing this additional project within ZARAH, she will take a sabbatical, occasionally making appearances to further promote her book, Coerced Labour, Forced Displacement, and the Soviet Gulag, 1880s-1930s, published in 2024 by Amsterdam University Press.
 
Before concluding, we would like to mention an upcoming conference event in autumn 2026, organized by the working group “Feminist Labour History” of the European Labour History Network (ELHN). The conference will certainly carry on the banner of gendered labour history, inclusive social movement history and innovative global and Eastern European history; more than one member of the ZARAH team is involved in the preparations:
Deadline for submissions: 15 November 2025
The conference will take takes place in Warsaw at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences from 14-16 October 2026.
We hope to meet you all again, personally, virtually, through each other’s writings and via exchange and collaboration, hopefully in many lively formats!
Attuned, as ever, to critical and enticing historical writing, the ZARAH team says GOODBYE!
Susan Zimmermann (Principal Investigator) and Lukas Neissl (Program Manager), on behalf of the entire ZARAH team

ZARAH Circular No. 6
18 December 2024

Dear colleagues, dear friends,

before the year comes to an end, we would like to launch our ZARAH Circular No. 6, sharing some information on our activities.

On 12 December 2024, we submitted the manuscript of our collaborative monograph Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond: A new transnational history, for copy-editing to our publisher UCL Press. Co-authored by all members of the ZARAH Team (Selin Çağatay, Mátyás Erdélyi, Alexandra Ghiț, Olga Gnydiuk, Veronika Helfert, Ivelina Masheva, Zhanna Popova, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa and Susan Zimmermann), the massive volume will be published in print and open access in early 2025. Arranged in three sections, the ten book chapters discuss women’s activism within ‘classical’ labour movement settings, women’s gendered activist agendas and repertoires, and women’s labour activism across class and political divides. A commented chronology in pictures points to the book’s key concepts and approach and illustrates our key findings. Tables and appendices add information on women labour activists and their organizing and actions, within and beyond the region, across a time span of more than a century. The introductory chapter, our concluding essay and a section on concepts and terminology, help situate the history of women’s labour activism in our region of focus and transnationally within global labour and gender history. Women’s Labour Activism finds its place in the book series ‘Work Around the World’ which UCL Press publishes in association with the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The series editors at IISH provided invaluable support on the road to publication, as did (among others named in the book) Dorothy Sue Cobble who has also written a foreword to the book.

Several articles and book chapters by individual team members on themes integral to their component studies have been published in 2024, including on peasant women’s activism in Hungary in the late 19th century; rationalization and skills in the Bulgarian tobacco industry in the 1930s; transnational trade union collaboration and women workers’ education in Turkey between the 1960s and the 1980s; migrant women and trade unions in Austria and internationally between the 1960s and the 1980s; second wave feminists and women trade unionists in Austria in the 1970s and 1980s; and an article accompanying the English-language translation of a key text produced by a labour activist from our region.

One great news is that the volume Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries, which we edited (Brill 2024), has now been fully switched to open access, making available online all book chapters written by colleagues from Eastern Europe and around the world.

The ERC accepted our application for a one-year extension of the ZARAH project, moving the project end date from 2025 to 2026. All ZARAH team members remain research affiliates of the ZARAH project until the new project end date (insofar as they wish to). Doctoral candidate Jelena Tešija has won the prestigious 12-month Marietta Blau Grant of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, spending 12 months at the Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Some of the ZARAH researchers have moved or are moving to new positions. Ivelina Masheva is an assistant professor at the Institute for Historical Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Alexandra Ghiț is a researcher in the ERC-funded project “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe” at the University of Vienna, Austria. Olga Gnydiuk will contribute to the project “Ukrainian History Global Initiative”. Eszter Varsa is Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Gender Studies at CEU in the winter term 2024-2025. Zhanna Popova has become a contracted researcher responsible for the development of the ZARAH public history website (see below).

The ZARAH project is indeed moving to its concluding stage. Our work at this stage is focused – besides developing new research avenues for the post-ZARAH period – on two main areas related to public history and the dissemination of our research results.

Firstly, we are completing our database ZARAH DB. The database has accumulated and continues to accumulate highly curated document records as well as the so-called special records on events, places, and – importantly – persons. The people records give detailed information on a large spectrum of women labour activists from the region studied in ZARAH, ranging from grass-roots militant activists to top-level functionaries. These records are sometimes linked to the extensive abstracts of interviews with the activist concerned. The information about Éva Laczkó, born 1942, Hungary, and an abstract of her interview (see people record and interview record) are but one example of what can be found in ZARAH DB.

Secondly, since spring 2024 we are moving into the decisive stage of translating our research results into the public history outlets that constitute the two concluding pillars of the ZARAH project. One is the ZARAH public history website, which Zhanna Popova and an excellent web design company have been contracted to develop. A comprehensive public history volume, written by Emily Gioielli, is the second public history output of the ZARAH project. The volume will be published in open access in English and several languages spoken in the region studied by ZARAH. The research of all ZARAH team members is the foundation on which both the website and the volume are built.

Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share. And just as a note: People interested in receiving our circular are kindly asked to write to zarah.info@ceu.edu.

In 2024, we have been doing our work while crueller wars and an even stronger presence of new and old fascisms encouraged unbridled racism, sexism, material exclusion, environmental destruction and violence, in all parts of the world, directly and indirectly. Not least, then, 2024 underscores the urgency and seriousness of witnessing and writing history critically and with a sense of hope for a more just world.

We wish you peaceful holidays and all the best for 2025!

The ZARAH Team

ZARAH Circular No. 5
20 December 2023

Dear colleagues, dear friends,

welcome to the ZARAH Circular No. 5, by which we share some new pieces of information on our activities.

You have not heard from ZARAH since quite some time – we have been quite busy moving forward our publications and some other activities.

We are happy to report that the ZARAH Team published a special issue “Women’s Labour Activism in Central and Eastern Europe and Internationally in the Twentieth Century” in the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 31 (2023) no. 2. Most team members contributed to the introductory article and authored individual articles. The contributions to the special issue are available open access on the journal website and the ZARAH website, where we also display all other ZARAH-related publications.

ZARAH team member Eszter Varsa received one of the Emma Goldman Awards 2023!

The volume Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries (Leiden: Brill 2024), edited by the ZARAH Team, is in press, and will be published in the coming weeks. We are delighted (and relieved) that this large piece of work is done.
We consider the volume a pioneering one on the road towards writing new histories of women’s labour activism in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. The book, published in the series Studies in Global Social History edited by Marcel van der Linden, arises from the international conference we organized in October 2021 under pandemic conditions. Back then, in an open call for papers, we invited colleagues to read sources with which they are working or plan to work “through the prism of gender and work”. The massive volume resulting from the conference assembles 18 contributions on nearly 600 pages. This includes our introduction, in which we present the chapters collected in the volume, discuss key clusters of the scholarship published in many languages, and deliberate merits and problem zones of a long-term, transregional, integrative und critical approach to the history of women’s labour activism in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. All contributions to the book will be (or become) accessible open access (with a short delay).

On the ZARAH Blog, our Guest Blog Series IV “Through the Lens of Women’s Work and Activism”, brings together ten amazing pieces of work, written by guest contributing researchers. Published between November 2022 and April 2023, the ten blog posts discuss unknown, unexpected, and exciting original sources, and showcase the authors’ inspired thinking about the history of women’s labour-related activisms.

ZARAH DB, our project database, has new features and includes a growing number of documents.
Encouraged by the news about a global data project of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam on labour activism, the Global Hub Labour Conflicts, we decided to make accessible the Metadata Hierarchy on which ZARAH DB is built. The Metadata Hierarchy includes all pre-set keywords we can use when describing items included in ZARAH DB, ordered into categories and sub-categories. On the website, we display this structured list of key concepts as a coloured table. We hope that with ZARAH’s combined focus on a less known region and women’s labour activism, we can contribute to the development of a global vocabulary and a global network of data on labour conflicts and labour activism. We discussed possibilities of collaboration with the researchers responsible at IISH for the Global Hub Labour Conflicts.
We continue to generate core entries in ZARAH DB, including entries which refer to documents in English and of high relevance for women’s labour activism in our region of focus and beyond. One example is the newly added document “Enhancing the Role of Women in the Building of a Developed Socialist Society: Decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party of March 6, 1973”. We hope to inspire many people to look into the history of women’s labour activism via making available documents of this kind.

The last two news items that we can share concern the 4th ZARAH Annual International Workshop which took place between 16 and 18 October in Vienna, and the work on the manuscript of our collaborative monograph Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond: A New Transnational History.
The detailed book proposal, as revised after peer review and publisher’s review, was accepted by UCL Press in autumn 2023. During the 4th International Workshop, we discussed (initial) chapter drafts with the two invited international experts, Diane P. Koenker (University College London) and Leda Papastefanaki (University of Ioannina), and received insightful and thought-provoking feedback.
Other sessions of the workshop were dedicated to the discussion of ongoing research of the two experts, and Leda Papastefanaki gave a public lecture at CEU at the time of the workshop.

Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share. And just as a note: People interested in receiving our circular are kindly asked to write to zarah.info@ceu.edu.

Best wishes,

Susan Zimmermann (Principal Investigator) and Lukas Neissl (Program Manager), on behalf of the entire ZARAH Team

ZARAH Circular No. 4
17 October 2022

Dear colleagues, dear friends,

welcome to the ZARAH Circular No. 4, by which we share some new pieces of information on our activities.

We are excited to report that results of the international conference “Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries” which we organized in October 2021 are assembled in the manuscript of an edited volume “Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th to 20th Centuries”, submitted to the Brill Publishers series “Studies in Global Social History”, edited by Marcel van der Linden. The peer review has recommended the volume – as “a wonderful collection of case studies, which are informative, fill many blank spaces, and clarify many things” – for publication, requesting various revisions which we are currently facilitating and undertaking.

In early October 2022, we organized a series of events, starting with a public lecture by Mahua Sarkar (University of Toronto) on 10 October 2022. The lecture took place in conjunction with the 3rd ZARAH Annual International Workshop. At the workshop, we discussed work in progress with Sylvia Hahn and Mahua Sarkar who participated as invited international experts. We also made first steps, in collaboration with invited public history and digital humanities experts, towards designing the public history elements of ZARAH.

In the near future, we will start publishing our fourth blog series. This time we have invited colleagues working from and on many places to present a glimpse of their ongoing research on the problems of women, work and activism in Central and Eastern Europe.

We have organized a double session entitled “An Inclusive History of Women’s Labour Activism: Forms and Scales of Organizing and the Politics of Women’s Work” at the 14th European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) taking place on 12-15 April 2023 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Finally, we are happy to share that our proposal for a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (JCCEE) titled “Women and the Gendered Politics of Work in Central and Eastern Europe and Internationally: Multi-Level Activism and Governance in the 20th Century” has been accepted and is scheduled for submission and peer view in 2023.

Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share. And just as a note: People interested in receiving our circular are kindly asked to write to zarah.info@ceu.edu.

Best wishes,

Susan Zimmermann (Principal Investigator) and Lukas Neissl (Program Manager), on behalf of the entire ZARAH Team

ZARAH Circular No. 3
29 November 2021

Dear colleagues, dear friends,

welcome to the Circular No. 3, by which we share some new pieces of information on our activities.

Before we all left for our summer break, our database, which we consider a milestone in our project work and a relevant open access research tool for all, went online; in autumn, soon after our return to Vienna, a series of inspiring events took place. We briefly report on all these here. Finally, just a few days ago, we published the Introduction to our third Blog Series on Transnational Links and the History of Women’s Labour Activism; more contributions from our team will follow at regular intervals until spring!

Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share. And just as a note: People interested in receiving our circular are kindly asked to write to zarah.info@ceu.edu.

Best wishes,

Susan Zimmermann (Principal Investigator) and Lukas Neissl (Program Manager), on behalf of the entire ZARAH Team

ZARAH Circular No. 3

ZARAH Circular No. 2
12 April 2021

Dear colleagues, dear friends,

welcome to the ZARAH Circular No. 2! The ZARAH Circulars function as a channel of communication, sharing information on our ERC project “Women’s labour activism in Eastern Europe and transnationally, from the age of empires to the late 20th century” and related activities, and initiating and informing about various kinds of collaboration. Today we would like to share two pieces of information.

  • In the previous ZARAH Circular we had disseminated a call for contributions for an international workshop/conference on “Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries” aimed at bringing together researchers from various backgrounds and encouraging mutually beneficial discussions and collaborations, resulting in a highly visible international publication. We received an impressive number of innovative and exiting paper proposals and are looking forward to the next stage of this collaborative project. We are excited to publish the attached draft program of the conference that will take place on 14-16 October 2021 at the Central European University in Vienna. The event brings together scholars with diverse backgrounds, at varying stages of their careers in leading research institutions in Europe and beyond.
  • In the academic year 2020/2021 we have published two series of entries on the ZARAH Blog: Blog Series I: Finding Women in the Sources and Blog Series II: Putting Activists Centre Stage. The introductions to the blog series and the individual entries give insight into the process and various dimensions of research on the history of women’s labour activism. The two series published so far discuss opportunities and limitations of different types of primary material and illustrate how a focus on individual activists’ careers and life stories can help to develop our understanding of the history of women’s labour activism. We hope that the ZARAH Blog sparks interest in the history of women’s labour activism, and that the considerations and examples on how to do such research can serve as inspiration for scholars, students and activists alike.

Please feel invited to turn the attention of your colleagues to the ZARAH Circular. People interested in joining our mailing list are kindly asked to contact Ivelina Masheva, handling ZARAH’s network and public outreach, via zarah.info@ceu.edu.

Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share.

Best wishes,

Susan Zimmermann (Principal Investigator) and Lukas Neissl (Program Manager), on behalf of the entire ZARAH Team

Draft Program “Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries“

ZARAH Circular No. 1
27 November 2020

Dear colleagues, dear friends,

we would like to thank you for having joined our mailing list and warmly welcome you amongst the recipients of our ZARAH Circular No. 1. Via this newly established channel for communication, we will be sharing information on our ERC project “ZARAH: Women’s labour activism in Eastern Europe and transnationally, from the age of empires to the late 20th century” (https://zarah-ceu.org/) and initiating various kinds of collaboration.

With this first ZARAH Circular we would like to disseminate a Call for Contributions discussing “Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries”. Herewith, we aim to provide a forum for bringing together researchers from various backgrounds and to encourage mutually beneficial discussions and collaborations, resulting in a highly visible international publication. The specific steps and deadlines are outlined in the attached Call. Please feel free to disseminate the Call.

Please also feel invited to turn the attention of your colleagues to the ZARAH Circular. People interested in joining our mailing list are kindly asked to contact Ivelina Masheva, handling ZARAH’s network and public outreach, via zarah.info@ceu.edu.

Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share.

Best wishes,

Susan Zimmermann (Principal Investigator) and Lukas Neissl (Program Manager), on behalf of the entire ZARAH Team

Call for Contributions “Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries”