Prof. Dr. Celia Donert

Celia Donert is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on Central Europe, communism and state socialism, human rights, gender, and more broadly, social histories of international order. She is the author of The Rights of the Roma: The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge, 2017) and edited volumes on women's rights as human rights, the legacies of the Romani genocide in postwar Europe, women's rights and global socialism during the Cold War, and everyday life during state socialism in East Central Europe since 1945. She is an editor of Contemporary European History and a new book series, published by Cambridge University Press, entitled European Histories of the Present.

Research Project

'Women's Rights are Human Rights': Gendering Universalism and Particularism in (post-) socialist Europe

Celia Donert's research explores the history of women's rights in twentieth-century Central Europe. During her stay in Munich, she will focus particularly on the tensions between universalism and particularism in legal, political and societal debates about women's rights in the period of late socialism and post-socialist transformation, both in Central Europe and globally. Rather than seeing the discourse of women's human rights as a Western import, Donert will explore the entangled history of women's rights across the ideological divides of the twentieth-century international order, and their transformation in the fractured political landscape of the early twenty-first century world.