Andrea Pető
Jews in Postwar Hungary. The Politics of Emotions
The talk discusses the experiences of one of the largest surviving Jewish communities in Europe. After giving a brief overview of the state of research on institutions, demography, and leading personalities, it explores the politics of sources and of institutional and personal stories based on ego-documents and the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive testimonies, with a special emphasis on gendered experiences. By exploring this aspect of the testimonies, this talk aims to contribute to an understanding of constructions of emotional communities, and to investigate different source genres in order to trace how the language of emotions was learned and performed in the sources influencing historical narratives.
Andrea Pető is a professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary and holds a Doctor of Science degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She has written five monographs, edited thirty-one volumes, and her works on gender, politics, the Holocaust, and war have been translated into seventeen languages. In 2018 she was awarded the 2018 All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values. She edited, with Louise Hecht and Karoline Krauska, Women and Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges (2015), and, with Judith Szapor, Maura Hametz, and Marina Calloni, Jewish Intellectual Women in Central Europe 1860-2000 (2012). She has co-authored a volume with Ildiko Barna which maps the activity of the people’s tribunals in Budapest using quantitative methods (Political Justice in Budapest After World War II, 2015) and edited the Macmillan Handbook Gender and War in 2017.