Past Events

CAROLINE NILSEN (Ph.D. Candidate, UNC–Chapel Hill Department of History)

German-Norwegian Romance, Marriage, and Childbirth: Sexual Relations under the Strain of Occupation

The German Wehrmacht occupied Norway in April 1940 and stayed in the country until the end of the Second World War. The presentation explores the tensions that characterized this occupation and the experiences of the occupying German soldiers. The disparities between Nazi ideology, expectations and reality will be examined with a focus on the masculine sexual behavior and its consequences. The racist Nazi propaganda written by and for German soldiers, which encouraged relations between German soldiers and Norwegian women will be contrasted with the practice of sexual relations and marriages between them, which led to 10,000 to 12,000 German-Norwegian children born during the occupation. These children seem to indicate that the Nazi expectations were fulfilled to quite a high degree. At the same time, however, personal interactions of German men and Norwegian women were to a surprising extent hindered by the military concerns of the German occupation regime.

Caroline Nilsen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has just returned from 18 months of research in Germany and Norway, and is in the early stages of writing her dissertation, entitled “Children of Shame: The Contested Legacy of the SS Lebensborn Program, 1940–Present.”

Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN (UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of History)

In collaboration with the North Carolina German Studies Seminar Series

5:30 – 7:00 PM • UNC–Chapel Hill • Hamilton Hall 569 • Click for a Map

MIGUEL LA SERNA (Associate Professor, UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of History)

The Internal Revolution: Women Leaders of  Peru’s Shining Path and MRTA Guerrillas

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, two guerrilla groups, the Shining Path and the MRTA, took up arms against the Peruvian state, thrusting the Andean heartland into a bloody civil war that would claim the lives of nearly 70,000 people. While studies of Peru’s political violence abound, few have examined the complicated and often contradictory role that gender played at the highest levels of its guerrilla organizations. This lecture offers a rare portrait of the highest-ranking women in each armed group, Augusta La Torre (Shining Path) and Lucero Cumpa (MRTA). In discussing these women’s extraordinary rise within their respective organizations, as well as the personal and gendered challenges they faced in obtaining and maintaining positions of power within them, this lecture highlight the internal contradictions that would come to define Peru’s late-twentieth century revolutionary experience.

Miguel La Serna is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has written numerous works on Peruvian political violence, including The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency (2012). He is currently working on two projects, a character-driven history of the Shining Path war (co-authored with Duke anthropologist Orin Starn), and a narrative history of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA).

Moderation: ARIANA VIGIL (UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of Women and Gender Studies)

In collaboration with the UNC–Chapel Hill Institute for the Studies of the Americas

5:30 – 7:00 PM • UNC–Chapel Hill • Hamilton Hall 569 • Click for a Map

HANNAH ONTIVEROS (Ph.D. Candidate, Duke University Department of History)

Camouflaged Etiquette: Gender and Standards of Behavior in the U.S. Military, 1960–1980

“Camouflaged Etiquette” examines depictions of enlisted women in official military documents and media reports in the 1970s. These documents attempted to configure a female military officer, at a time when the only existing metric was male. Furthermore, rules pertaining to and depictions of enlisted women reflected an attempt to hold on to a nebulous idea of what the U.S. military had been in the past—an ideal that never existed—while grappling with the changing structure and status of the U.S. military in the 1970s. Enlisted people—men and women—were expected to exhibit an air of respectability to reflect a mythical gentlemanly past of the U.S. military. Thus the military accepted women broadly into its ranks, but made no structural changes to the male-genderedness of the institution. Rather, as this paper will demonstrate, enlisted women were put in an impossible position, expected to adapt to the male culture of the armed forces, while simultaneously demonstrating their respectable nature as proper women.

Hannah Ontiveros is a PhD student at Duke University, working on 20th-Century U.S. in the World and gender. Her research centers around women in the U.S. military and military wives during the Korean War (1950–1953), focusing on how gendered labor in the armed forces and at home facilitated the mechanisms of U.S. Empire.

Moderation: KATHERINE TURK (UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of History)

In collaboration with the UNC–Chapel Hill Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense

5:30 – 7:00 PM • UNC–Chapel Hill • Hamilton Hall 569 • Click for a Map

MIRIAM COOKE (Braxton Craven Professor of Arab Cultures, Duke University, Department of History)

Islamic State, Women and Violence

The millennial association of rape and war was challenged in 2001 when the ICTY decreed that rape in war constituted a crime against humanity. Although men in all parts of the world at war have not been dissuaded from attacking women and men sexually, their actions are now more likely to be publicized and sometimes even prosecuted. Above all, victims are no longer always shamed into silence. One of the most disappointing instances of the strategic use of rape in war comes from the 2011 Egyptian, Libyan and Syrian revolutions when men and women protesters were systematically targeted. Victims spoke out despite stigma and some organized campaigns to prevent further violence. One of the most alarming instances of the strategic use of rape in war comes from Islamic State whose brutalization of Yazidi women in 2014 shocked the world. This talk will focus on media and artists’ representation of sexual violence in the 21st century Arab world.

Miriam Cooke is Braxton Craven Distinguished Professor of Arab Cultures at Duke University. Her writings have focused on the intersection of gender and war in modern Arabic literature and on Arab women writers’ constructions of Islamic feminism. She has written about Arab cultural studies with a concentration on Syria and the Arab Gulf. She is the author of several monographs that include Women and the War Story (1996); Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (2007); Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in The Arab Gulf (2014) and most recently Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience and the Syrian Revolution (2016).

Moderation: CEMIL AYDEN (UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of History)

In collaboration with: UNC–Chapel Hill Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations

5:30 – 7:00 PM • UNC–Chapel Hill • Hamilton Hall 569 • Click for a Map

MARILYN LAKE (Professor, University of Melbourne, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies)

The “White Man,” Race and Imperial War during the Long Nineteenth Century

The lecture explores the transnational formation of the gendered and racialized figure of the ‘white man’ in the constitutive relations of colonial conquest and imperial rule across the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The self-styled bearer of a ‘civilizing mission’ to Indigenous peoples, the ‘white man’ became a perpetrator of violence and atrocity as imperial rule and colonial settlement encountered continuing resistance and guerrilla warfare. In the process the older ideal of “moral manliness” gave way to a more modern conception of masculinity characterized by toughness, aggression and a capacity to use firearms to “pacify the natives.” Defined by power, even as he was haunted by his vulnerability, the “white man” engaged in systematic denial and disavowal, evasion and euphemism and narratives of nation-building that justified his right to rule.

Marilyn Lake holds an Australian Research Council Professorial Research Fellowship and is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academies of Humanities and Social Sciences. She has published widely on gender, war, empire, feminism and race. Most recently the multi-prize winning Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (2008) co-authored with Henry Reynolds; and the controversial What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarization of Australian History (2010). Lake’s current research explores the international history of Australian democracy. Her next book is a transnational study of American/Australian progressives, women and men, 1870–1920.

Moderation: FITZ BRUNDAGE (UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of History)

In cooperation with the UNC–Chapel Hill Department of History • Carolina Seminar on Transnational and Modern Global History

ANDREA A. SINN (Assistant Professor, Elon University, Department of History and Geography)

Joining the German Home Front: Women, Religion, and World War I

Traditionally, the history of World War I is told predominantly from the vantage point of men, and those academics, who have engaged in the analysis of women’s wartime experiences, have largely neglected to explore their religion and ethnicity. By using gender and religion as complementary lenses, this project argues that the war blurred the religious spheres that up to 1914 defined the home and turned women into historical actors that produced wartime solidarity and thus played a decisive role in shaping Germany during World War I. In addition, as will be demonstrated through a close analysis of Jewish female accounts, the war created new opportunities for Jewish integration at home, a result that seems to contradict the established scholarly narrative which portrays the German-Jewish wartime experience as one that was dominated by Anti-Semitism, most notably symbolized by the infamous Jew Count of 1916.

Andrea A. Sinn is Assistant Professor of History at Elon University. Her publications include Die Erfahrung des Exils: Vertreibung, Emigration und Neuanfang – Ein Münchner Lesebuch, with Andreas Heusler (2015); Jüdische Politik und Presse in der frühen Bundesrepublik (2014); and “Und ich lebe wieder an der Isar:” Exil und Rückkehr des Münchner Juden Hans Lamm (2008).

Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN (UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of History)

In cooperation with the North Carolina German Studies Seminar Series

JEFFREY WADE JONES (Associate Professor, UNC–Greensboro, Department of History)

The Soviet–Afghan War’s Unwomanly Face: The Representation of Women in Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys

In keeping with her journalistic style of conveying the views of others, the voice of 2015 Nobel Prize winning author Svetlana Alexievich is limited in the oral history she published in 1990 under the Belorussian title Цинковые Мајіьчики or Zinky Boys. The title refers to the “boys” who came home from the war in zinc coffins, but for the book she interviewed soldiers, women who served as nurses, civilian employees, and, most poignantly, the mothers and wives of slain soldiers. The lecture explores a key underlying tension of her narrative: whereas many saw themselves fighting in the shadow of the heroic memory of World War II for the sake of the “Motherland” (Rodina), most of the mothers themselves whose words are sprinkled throughout the text and who symbolically, collectively represent the Motherland do not understand nor accept the cause for which their sons fought and died.

Jeffrey W. Jones is an Associate Professor of Russian-Soviet history at the UNC–Greensboro. He published Everyday Life and the ‘Reconstruction’ of Soviet Russia During and After the Great Patriotic War, 1943–1948 (2008). He is currently working on a book entitled Smoke, Mirrors and Memories: Varying Perspectives of the Soviet–Afghan War, 1979–2015.

Moderation: DONALD J. RALEIGH (UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of History & Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies)

In cooperation with the UNC–Chapel Hill Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies

LUISE WHITE (Professor, University of Florida, Department of History)

Boyhood: Tracking in the Rhodesian Army during the Zimbabwe War of Liberation (1964–1979)

The presentation explores the tracking of African guerrillas by the Rhodesian security forces during Zimbabwe’s liberation war. Like hunters before them, Rhodesian forces had promoted the ideal of the loyal, aged Bushman tracker, whose natural skills allowed him to read broken branches and trampled grass to see who was going where and at what speed. Whites could learn to read the landscape as well, but such knowledge was best acquired in childhood from an African playmate in an African language. This was bushcraft: at best it could become second nature, but even so it became the basis for a claim to belonging in Africa.   But as the war and conscription intensified in the mid–1970s Rhodesian commanders began to doubt the efficacy of bushcraft and taught a kind of tracking that was a matter of recognizing the treads of shoes.

Luise White is Professor of History at the University of Florida and a fellow at the National Humanities Center 2016–17. Her publications include The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (1990); Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (2000); The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (2003); and Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization (2015).

Moderation: EMILY BURILL (UNC–Chapel Hill, African Studies Center  and Department of Women and Gender Studies)

In cooperation with the UNC–Chapel Hill African Studies Center

4:00 – 6:00 pm • UNC–Chapel Hill • Institute for Arts and Humanities • Hyde Hall • Incubator Room

Public Lecture:

KAREN PETRONE (University of Kentucky, Department of History)

Gendering War Memories: The First World War in Eastern European Memory

Gendered language and representations are an essential aspect of depicting war both while it is going on, and when it is being remembered. The mechanized warfare and mass slaughter of World War I posed a significant challenge to the traditional image of the masculine warrior hero in Russia and Eastern Europe. At the same time, revolutionary notions of gender equality and citizenship destabilized the gender order. While interwar European memory tended to shore up and reinforce the faltering male warrior identity, important aspects of Soviet memory of the 1920s contested this dominant male identity. In the 1930s, however, a militarizing Soviet state deliberately remasculinized and reheroized the memory of the First World War in the interests of mobilization for the next inevitable war.

Karen Petrone is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Kentucky. Her primary research interests are cultural history, gender history, propaganda, representations of war, and the history of subjectivity and everyday life, especially in Russia and the Soviet Union. Her recent book The Great War in Russian Memory (Indiana University Press, 2011) challenges the notion that World War I was a forgotten war in the Soviet Union. She is also the author of Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (2000) and has co-edited three books: The New Muscovite Cultural History (2009), Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship (2011), and Everyday Life in Russia Past and Present (2014). She is currently working on a book-length project on late-Soviet and early post-Soviet war memory.

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: Center for European Studies • Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies • Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense • Department of History • Institute for Arts and Humanities • Duke University: Department of History • Carolina Seminar Russia and its Empires East and West • Triangle Institute for Security Studies

The lecture is related to a Reading Seminar with Karen Petrone.

We will discuss her book The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington, IN, 2011). Participants are invited to read the introduction and chapter 3, 6 and 8. The reading seminar takes place from 12:30 – 2:00 pm at the UNC–Chapel Hill Institute for Arts and Humanities Incubator Room.

The reading seminar is open for faculty and graduate students. Registration is necessary. Lunch will be served. Please register by Friday, November 7, 2014 by sending an email to Karen Hagemann.

The Public Lecture and Reading Seminar are part of the UNC World War I Centenary Project

3:00 – 7:00 pm UNC–Chapel Hill • Institute for Arts and Humanities • Hyde Hall • University Room

Film Screening:

Award Winning Documentary: The Invisible War

USA, 2012. Director: KIRBY DICK (97 minutes)

Public Lecture:

SARAH STEIN (NC State University, Department of Communication)

KRISTINA BELL (High Point University, Department of Communication)

Rape in the US Military: Media Coverage from the Tailhook Scandal to the “Invisible War”, 1991–2013

The presentation will address a mediated dimension of the recent years’ revelations about sexual assault and rape by U.S. servicemen against female and male members of the American armed forces. These crimes have been part of the military culture for decades and have been reported on by mainstream newspapers. Yet, until the 2012 release of the comprehensive documentary The Invisible War, public awareness of the issue was low and little legislative action was proposed. The release of the film brought a high level of both Congressional and public attention to the current state of sexual predation in the military, in contrast to the relatively undocumented culture of ongoing military sexual abuse brought by prior newspaper reporting on these crimes. Our presentation will focus on the results of a content analysis of specific reporting characteristics in mainstream newspaper reports about military sexual assault from the past twenty-two years (beginning with the 1991 Navy Tailhook sex scandal). It will address questions regarding how public attention could have remained so low for so long and how and why newspaper reporting can be framed in ways that do little to reveal internal problems at institutions as large and self-determining as the military.

Sarah Stein is Associate Professor the Department of Communication of North Carolina State University. She began her academic career after a 25 year career as a freelance documentary film editor in New York City during which she edited two films that won Academy Awards, and numerous films that won Emmys, Columbia-Dupont, national & international film festivals. She teaches film production and critical/theoretical approaches to communication and technology. Her current research foci are on mediated accounts of military sexual crimes and on portrayals of death and grief in popular media.

Kristina Bell is an Instructor of Communication in the Nido R. Qubein School of Communication and a Ph.D. student in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at North Carolina State University. Her work uses critical and interpretive methods to explore issues of gender and race in digital media and pop culture.

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: Center for European Studies; Department of History; Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense; Department of Women’s and Gender Studies; Institute for Arts and Humanities • Duke University: Department of History • Triangle Institute for Security Studies

Public Lecture:

CHÉRIE RIVERS NDALIKO (UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of Music)

“A Look That Kills”: Representations of Gender and Sexual Violence in the Current Conflict in Congo

The conflict unfolding in the east of Congo is the deadliest since World War II and is characterized, among other atrocities, by extreme sexual violence. In the last decade, a growing number of Western documentary filmmakers have attempted to alert global audiences to the epidemic of rape as a weapon of war. These films have given rise to a wave of gendered humanitarian interventions that aim to rehabilitate Congolese women victims. Simultaneously, local Congolese artists and activists have created their own strategies for representing sexual violence and intervening in the conflict through civil society initiatives. This presentation offers a comparative analysis of foreign vs. local depictions of Congolese women. By examining contrasting visual images, it foregrounds the lived consequences of rhetorics of victimhood or of survival and examines what is at stake at the intersection of humanitarianism, culture production, and representations of gender in eastern Congo.

Chérie Rivers Ndaliko is Assistant Professor at the UNC–Chapel Hill Department of Music. Her research focuses on radical arts interventions in conflict regions of Africa. Her current book project, Charitable Imperialism, examines the effects of humanitarian aid on culture production in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. She also serves as co-director of the Yole! Africa Culture Center in Goma.

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: Center for European Studies; Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense; Department of History; Department of Music; Department of Women’s and Gender Studies; Institute for Arts and Humanities • Duke University: Department of History • Triangle Institute for Security Studies

Public Lecture:

DUBRAVKA ZARKOV (The International Institute for Social Studies, The Hague)

Masculinity, Sexual Violence, and Ethnicity in the 1990s Wars on the Balkan and Beyond

The wars in former Yugoslavia were notorious for the rape of women as one of the major war strategies. It is a less known fact that, within the war camps, detained men faced systematic sexual assaults too. Why were the assaults on men invisible? Why did the academics and media that wrote extensively about rapes of women not pay attention to sexual assaults on men? Is this a special, isolated case, or are there other wars and violent conflicts where sexual assaults on men are invisible? And if the violated bodies of men were exposed in other conflicts, what accounts for this exposure? In trying to answer those questions, the lecture explores the nexus of masculinity, heteronormativity and power, in intersections with ethnicity, race, and religion.

Dubravka Zarkov is Associate Professor of Gender, Conflict and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. She published together with Marlies Glasius, Narratives of Justice in and out of the Courtroom: Former Yugoslavia and Beyond (2014); Gender, Violent Conflict, and Development (2008); The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (2007); Working Through the War: Trajectories of Non-Governmental; Governmental Organizations Engaged in Psycho-social Assistance to Victims of War and Family Violence in the ex-Yugoslav States (2005); and together with Cynthia Cockburn, Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities and International Peacekeeping (2002).

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: Center for European Studies; Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies; Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense; Department of History; Department of Women’s and Gender Studies; Institute for Arts and Humanities • Duke University: Department of History • Triangle Institute for Security Studies

Public Keynote:

KRISTEN P. WILLIAMS (Clark University, Department of Political Science)

Gender, War, and Humanitarian Intervention in the 21st Century

In the two decades since the Cold War ended, humanitarian crises have continued to plague the international community: Bosnia, DRC, Kosovo, Libya, Rwanda, Sudan, and Syria, to name a few. Calls for humanitarian intervention to protect civilians and alleviate significant human rights violations have been made. Yet, as feminist scholars remind us, humanitarian intervention is highly gendered: decision makers frame intervention as a masculine endeavor in which men are the protectors and women are the protected. This talk will explore several questions: What might a feminist framework for humanitarian intervention and post-war reconstruction processes look like? In what ways do race, ethnicity, and class intersect with gender when examining cases of intervention and peacebuilding? How can the gendered discourse be altered in order to promote gender equality and prioritize women’s needs and concerns during war and after?

Kristen P. Williams is Professor of Political Science at Clark University. Her research interests are in the field of international relations, focusing on nationalism, ethnic conflict, gender, and international relations theory. Her recent publications include: Women at War, Women Building Peace: Challenging Gender Norms (2013); Ethnic Conflict: A Systematic Approach to Cases of Conflict, with Neal G. Jesse (2011); Women and War: Gender Identity and Activism in Times of Conflict (2010); Identity and Institutions: Conflict Reduction in Divided Societies (2005); Despite Nationalist Conflicts: Theory and Practice of Maintaining World Peace (2001); and together with Joyce P. Kaufman Women, the State, and War: A Comparative Perspective on Citizenship and Nationalism (2007). She is co-editor, with Steven Lobell and Neal G. Jesse, of Beyond Great Powers and Hegemons: Why Secondary States Support, Follow, or Challenge (2012).

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: Center for European Studies; Center for Global Initiatives; Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies; College of Arts & Sciences; Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense; Department of History; Institute for Arts and Humanities • Duke University: Center for European Studies; Department of History • German Historical Institute, Washington D.C. • Triangle Institute for Security Studies

The Public Keynote is part of the

WORKSHOP Gender, War and Humanitarianism in the Twentieth Century

and the

CONFERENCE Gender, War and Culture: From the Age of the World Wars to the Cold War, Anti-Colonial Struggle and the Wars of Globalization (1910s-Present)

which are taking place 11–13 September 2014 at the UNC–Chapel Hill Institute for Arts and Humanities.

Public Lecture:

KARA DIXON VUIC (High Point University, Department of History)

“Look, but Don’t Touch”: American Women as Military Entertainment

In every twentieth century war the U.S. military sent women entertainers to war zones. They opened canteens where soldiers could find a friendly face, performed on stage, played games and engaged in conversation, and brought a momentary reprieve from the war to the battlefield. This presentation examines the history of these programs, the military’s intentions for the women, and the meanings women ascribed to their work. It reveals the ways that feminine sexuality formed a central part of the state’s efforts to maintain an effective fighting force, construct martial masculinity, mobilize homefront support, and export American culture to foreign countries.

Kara Dixon Vuic is Associate Professor of History at High Point University. A historian of gender and the U.S. military, she is the author of Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (2010). She is writing a history of military and civilian agencies’ use of women to entertain American troops during World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and recent wars in the Middle East.

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: Center for European Studies; Department of Women’s and Gender Studies • Research Triangle Series on the History of Military, War and Society.

2014 Mary Stevens Reckford Memorial Lecture in European Studies:

MICHAEL GEYER (University of Chicago, Department of History)

An Age of Destruction: World War I One Hundred Years Later

The centenary of World War I is the occasion for unending retrospectives that express horror and amazement in the face of utter destruction. This lecture rather tries to articulate a different incomprehension. If World War I was a European war over the future of the world, the futures of the world that emerged from the age of destruction were unlike anything the belligerents, high and low, had expected. How could this happen? An answer to this question hinges, in part, on understanding the peculiar “totalizing” energy of the war, which was unleashed in 1914 and crashed through legal, political and “civilizational” hedges that had meant to contain violence – away from bourgeois society and beyond the European world. It also depends on making sense of an age of destruction – a yet more deadly war, a forty-year war-in-sight confrontation in Europe and the violent ends of empire – that emerged from World War I. Not least, it hangs on identifying the countervailing forces that broke, fractured, transformed, and excised this energy after the 19^th Century containments had collapsed. For in the end, we need not only make sense of a peculiar form of war, “total war,” but also of the long and violent transformation of Europe in the hundred years since 1914. How did the ‘men from Mars’ become the ‘people from Venus’? How did autocracies turn into democracies? How did a Europe of Empires turn into a Europe of interdependent nation states? World War I is at the cusp of these developments. It is both an end and a new beginning.

Michael Geyer is Samuel N. Harper Professor of German and European History and faculty director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. He has published widely on the history of war and genocide in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, German history and historiography, global history. His first major essay on World War I was “German Strategy in the Age of Machine Warfare, 1914–1945,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (1985).His current and forthcoming work include an edited volume on Zeitalter der Gewalt: Zur Geopolitik und Psychopolitik des Ersten Weltkrieges (together with Lutz Musner and Helmut Lethen, 2013), and Gewalt und Krieg in einem globalen Zeitalter, to be published in 2014 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: Center for European Studies • Research Triangle Series on the History of Military, War and Society • North Carolina German Studies Seminar Series.

Public Lecture:

FRIEDERIKE BRÜHÖFENER (UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Negotiating Gay Rights, Youth Protection and Combat Readiness: The West German Bundeswehr and the Reform of § 175 in the Criminal Code

Between 1969 and 1973, § 175 of the West German Criminal Code, which penalized male homosexuality, underwent considerable changes, resulting in a limited liberalization of the law. This reform was greatly influenced by political considerations about how it would affect the West German armed forces—the Bundeswehr. Jurists, politicians and military brass intensively discussed the possible effects of a liberalization of § 175 on the relation between younger soldiers and older officers. The main point of contention was the question whether the decriminalization of male homosexuality or the “protection” of young soldiers and the military’s combat readiness should take precedence.

Friederike Brühöfener is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UNC–Chapel Hill. She is currently finishing her dissertation thesis titled “Defining the West German Soldier: Military, Society and Masculinity in West Germany, 1945–1989.” Her research interests include Modern German and European, gender, cultural and military history.

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: Center for European Studies; Program in Sexuality Studies • The Research Triangle Series on the History of Military, War and Society • North Carolina German Studies Seminar Series.

Public Lecture:

ERIKA KUHLMAN (Idaho State University, Department of History)

Transnational Cultures of Mourning: War Widows and Fallen Soldiers in World War I

How nation-states laid claims on the bodies of soldiers and their wives during World War I is the theme of this lecture. It will analyze the experiences of war widows and their husbands comparatively to untangle the complex relationships between these two core wartime-figures and the nation-state. War widows could imagine the horrors of trench warfare as well as the sorrow of widows from other warring nations. As a result they participated not only in gendered mourning rituals endorsed by the state, but also created transnational cultures of mourning that challenged the nation-state’s right to the bodies of their husbands, to their own bodies, and the right to wage war in general.

Erika Kuhlman is Professor of History and director of women studies at Idaho State University. Her research focuses on comparative and transnational histories of World War I. Her books include Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War: Women, Gender, and Postwar Reconciliation between Nations (2008) and Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War (2012).

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: Center for European Studies; Department of Women’s and Gender Studies; • Research Triangle Series on the History of Military, War and Society.

Public Lecture:

MISCHA HONECK (German Historical Institute, Washington D.C.)

“For the Preservation of German Honor and Manhood”: Gender and the German American War for the Union

Many German-speaking migrants fought in the American Civil War. This lecture argues that a particular construction of masculinity motivated them to fight against slavery and secession. The transnational legacy of the European Revolution of 1848 and the divisive politics of the 1850s and 1860s devalued compromise, militarized German American culture, and nurtured an ideal of manhood that flaunted ethnic honor, principle, and sacrifice as its defining characteristics. Emotional and cultural factors pertaining to gender were at least as important in shaping the meaning of military service as “ideology” in the abstract.

Mischa Honeck is a research fellow for North American history at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. His main research interests are the histories of race and ethnicity, gender, and youth. He is the coeditor of Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–1914 (2013), and the author of We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (2011).

Co-Conveners: The Research Triangle Series on the History of Military, War and Society • North Carolina German Studies Seminar Series

Public Lecture:

ARIANA E. VIGIL (UNC–Chapel Hill Department of Women’s and Gender Studies)

War Narratives: Gender, Wars Gender, War, and Activism in Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production

From Mexican-Americans proportionally earning more Medals of Honor than any other ethnic group to the high casualty rates of Latina/os in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. Latina/os have a rich and complex relationship with U.S. militarism. This paper introduces the term “g(l)ocal war narrative” to capture the complexity of said relationship, looking at how Latina/os have responded to their engagements with U.S. militarism in the 20th and 21st centuries. Applying this new theoretical perspective to the memoir Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Sergeant Camilo Mejia, the paper illustrates how Nicaraguan-American veteran and activist Camilo Mejía locates violence within traditionally patriarchal and oppressive institutions—including the family, the military, and the state—as well as within “everyday” acts and practices.

Ariana E. Vigil is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is the author of several articles on transnational Latina/o texts including “Transnational Community in Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 10, no. 1. This talk is part of a book-length project entitled “Ni Aquí Ni Allá: Military Intervention, Domestic Violence and Latina/o Literature (1979–2005)”.

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.

Public Lecture:

SONYA O. ROSE (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Birkbeck College, University of London, Department of History)

Gender and the Politics of Sacrifice: Britain and the Colonial Empire in the Age of World War I

This lecture will explore what historical scholarship suggests about how the meanings of the key wartime concepts of service and sacrifice resonated within Britain and in the colonial empire with a primary focus on India. It will consider the political significance of service and sacrifice and the granting of universal suffrage for men and the enfranchisement of some women in the British metropole as a prelude to a discussion about ‘sacrifice’ and its political resonances in India. The talk will consider what it meant under different circumstances to ‘volunteer’ and will assess how colonial participation in the war effort was secured and with what consequences. The issues of gender, race and national consciousness will be central to the discussion.

Sonya O. Rose is Emeritus Professor of History, Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. A scholar of nineteenth and twentieth-century British history, she is the author of Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (1992); Which People’s War: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–45 (2003), and What is Gender History? (2010). She has also co-edited several volumes of essays, most recently with Catherine Hall, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (2006). Her work has focused on gender as a central factor in the development of industrial capitalism, in its complex relationship to citizenship, nationhood, and on the home front in World War II and its aftermath. Currently she is collaborating on an Oxford University Press handbook project, Gender, War and the Western World from 1650.

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: College of Arts & Sciences, Center for European Studies, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Department of History • Duke University Department of History • Triangle Institute for Security Studies • Triangle Global British History Seminar

Film Screening and Podium Discussion:

Gender, War and Violence: Remembering the 1990s Balkan Wars

Introduction:

The 1990s Balkan Wars

ROBERT JENKINS (UNC–Chapel Hill, Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies)

Movie Screening: In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011, Director: Angelina Jolie)

Set against the backdrop of the Bosnian War that tore the Balkan region apart in the 1990s, In the Land of Blood and Honey tells the story of Danijel and Ajla, a man and a woman from different sides of a brutal ethnic conflict. Danijel, a soldier fighting for the Serbs, and Ajla, a Bosnian held captive in the camp he oversees, knew each other before the war, and could have found love with each other. But as the armed conflict takes hold of their lives, their relationship grows darker, their motives and connection to one another ambiguous, their allegiances uncertain.

More information on the movie.

Podium Discussion:

The Movie and its Historical Background: Gender, War and Violence in the 1990s Balkan Wars

• DUBRAVKA ZARKOV (Erasmus University Rotterdam, International Institute of Social Studies)
• ROBERT JENKINS (UNC–Chapel Hill, Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies)
• ADNAN DZUHMUR(UNC–Chapel Hill, Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies)

Moderator: KAREN HAGEMANN (UNC–Chapel Hill Department of History)

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill College of Arts & Sciences; Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies; Center for European Studies; Center for Global Initiatives; Institute for the Arts and Humanities; Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense; Department of History; Department of Women’s and Gender Studies • Research Triangle Seminar Series on the History of Military, War and Society • Triangle Institute for Security Studies • West Triangle Chapter of the United Nations Association.

Public Lecture: 

DUBRAVKA ZARKOV (Erasmus University Rotterdam, International Institute of Social Studies)

Masculinity, Sexual Violence, and Ethnicity in the 1990s Balkan Wars and Beyond

The wars in former Yugoslavia were notorious for the rape of women as one of the major war strategies. It is less known fact that, within the war camps, detained men faced systematic sexual assaults too. Why were the assaults on men invisible? Why the academics and media that wrote extensively about rapes of women did not pay attention to sexual assaults on men? Is this a special, isolated case, or are there other wars and violent conflicts where sexual assaults on men are invisible? And if the violated bodies of men were exposed in other conflicts, what accounts for this exposure? In trying to answer those questions, the lecture explores the nexus of masculinity, heteronormativity and power, in intersections with ethnicity, race, and religion.

Dubravka Zarkov is Associate Professor of Gender, Conflict and Development, at the International Institute of Social Studies/Erasmus University Rotterdam. She published The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (2007) and Gender, Conflict, Development (2008).

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: College of Arts & Sciences; Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies; Center for European Studies; Center for Global Initiatives; Institute for the Arts and Humanities; Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense; Department of History; Department of Women’s and Gender Studies • Research Triangle Seminar Series on the History of Military, War and Society • Triangle Institute for Security Studies

Luncheon Reading Seminar:

Gender, Sexual Violence and War

DUBRAVKA ZARKOV (Erasmus University Rotterdam, International Institute of Social Studies)

Comments:

• SARAH E. WAGNER (The George Washington University, Department of Anthropology)
• MICHELE LEVY (North Carolina A&T State University, Department of English)

Moderator: KAREN HAGEMANN (UNC–Chapel Hill Department of History)

Suggested Readings:

• Doris Buss, “The Curious Visibility of Wartime Rape: Gender and Ethnicity in International Criminal Law,” Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 25, no. 1 (2007).
• Dubravka Zarkov, “Exposures and Invisibilities: Media, Masculinities and the Narratives of War in an Intersectional Perspective,” in Framing Intersectionality – Debates on a Multifaceted Concept in Gender Studies, edited by H. Lutz, M.T. Herrera Vivar and L. Supik (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 105–120.

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: College of Arts & Sciences; Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies; Center for European Studies; Center for Global Initiatives; Institute for the Arts and Humanities; Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense; Department of History; UNC Department of Women’s and Gender Studies • Research Triangle Seminar Series on the History of Military, War and Society • Triangle Institute for Security Studies

Public Lecture:

ANNEGRET FAUSER (UNC–Chapel Hill Department of Music and Department of Women’s and Gender Studies)

Gender, War and Culture: Music in the US during World War II

Traditionally gendered feminine in Western culture, music plays a particularly complex role in times of war, ranging from the practical to the ideological. Not only was music weaponized for use in war theaters and propaganda, but it also served as an agent in the construction of the so-called home-front. Drawing on both popular and classical music, I examine the intertwined destinies of music and gender in the United States during World War II.

Annegret Fauser is Professor of Music and Adjunct Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC–Chapel Hill. Her research engages with music in France and the U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The recipient of the 2011 Edward J. Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association, she has also held a number of prestigious fellowships in Australia, Europe, and the United States. From 2011–13, she is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. She is author of Der Orchestergesang in Frankreich zwischen 1870 und 1920 (1994), Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (2005), and Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (2013).

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: College of Arts & Sciences; Department of History; Department of Music; Department of Women’s and Gender Studies; Institute for the Arts and Humanities • Duke University: History Department • Research Triangle Series on the History of Military, War and Society • Institute for Security Studies

Public Lecture:

STEFAN DUDINK (Radboud University Nijmegen, Institute for Gender Studies)

Restoration in Uniform: Masculinity and Monarchical Representation in Post-revolutionary Europe, 1813–1819

The making of kings in Restoration Europe required strenuous and elaborate work in the realms of ritual and representation. This was the case for all European societies in which monarchy had lost its status as the self-evident and given political form, but in particular in the Netherlands where it had never possessed this status in the first place. This lecture explores the role of masculinity in the visual representations of the making of the Dutch monarchy. It will concentrate on the ways in which the representation of the king as a man in uniform became central to the staging of a new monarchy in a post-revolutionary age.

Stefan Dudink teaches at the Institute for Gender Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. Within the wider field of the history of gender and sexuality in modern Western political culture, his research concentrates on masculinity and sexuality. He has published a study on Dutch, late nineteenth-century liberalism, Deugdzaam liberalisme: Sociaal-liberalisme in Nederland 1870–1901 (Amsterdam, 1997), and is co-editor with Karen Hagemann and John Tosh of Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester, 2004) and with Karen Hagemann and Anna Clark of Representing Masculinity. Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture (New York, 2007).

Public Lecture:

Iraqi Women between Dictatorship, Sanctions, War and Occupation

NADJE AL-ALI (University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies)

Based on in-depth interviews with Iraqi women in the diaspora (US, UK, Jordan) as well as women from inside Iraq, the talk will provide a historical context to the current situation of women under occupation and political transition. Based on the conviction that it is impossible to understand the complexity of women and gender relation in the current post-invasion period without an understanding of the changing role of women and gender over the past decades, the talk will explore the impact of the initially secular modernist state project of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the militarization of society during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), the Gulf Crisis and Gulf War (1990–1991), and the subsequent economic sanctions regime (1990–2003) as a backdrop against the current situation of occupation and resistance. In terms of the current context, it will not only address women’s deterioration of legal rights, the increase in gender-based violence, and the impact of Islamist militias and ideologies, but will also discuss women’s political mobilization and resistance to both the occupation and increasing Islamist encroachment.

Nadje Al-Ali is Professor of Gender Studies and Chair of the Centre for Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her main research interests revolve around gender theory; feminist activism; women and gender in the Middle East; transnational migration and diaspora mobilization; war, conflict and reconstruction. She is currently President of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) and serves also a member of the Feminist Review Collective and a founding member of Act Together: Women’s Action for Iraq. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq, with Nicola Pratt (University of California Press, 2009); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (Zed Books, 2007); New Approaches to Migration, ed. with Khalid Koser (Routledge, 2002); Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Gender Writing – Writing Gender (American University in Cairo Press, 1994) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her most recent book is entitled Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives, co-edited with Nicola Pratt (Zed Books, 2009).

Co-Conveners: UNC–Chapel Hill: Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations; Center for European Studies; Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense; Department of Women’s Studies • Duke–UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies

 

Seminar:

FRIEDERIKE BRÜHÖFENER (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of History)

Sending Young Men to the Barracks: West Germany’s Struggle over the Establishment of New Armed Forces in the 1950s

In light of the Berlin Blockade (1948/49) and the outbreak of the Korean War (1950), the Western allies decided that the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany needed to be integrated into a Western defense community. This political move was welcomed by the Adenauer government, but faced severe opposition in the West German society, as large parts of society had to come to terms with the prospect of once again sending young men to the barracks. Since compulsory military service was defined solely as a man’s duty, many of the subsequent debates about West Germany’s rearmament centered on the question of how military life in barracks would shape and influence attitude and behavior of the Bürger in Uniform (male citizen in uniform). In this context, members of the parliament, representatives of the Ministry of Defense, church groups and social workers struggled to delineate acceptable behavioral and morale traits for the West German man in uniform. This struggle, the paper argues, was an important aspect of the overall attempt to fashion military forces that could be integrated into the newly established West German society.

Friederike Brühöfeneris a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UNC–Chapel Hill. She finished her B.A. in History and German at the University Bielefeld, Germany in 2005. After spending a year as an exchange student in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University, she completed her M.A. at the University Bielefeld in 2007. Her research and teaching interests include modern German and European history, history of masculinities, gender history, and cultural history.