Pulling the Threads Together

Organised by

• Department of History

The ERC-sponsored research project ZARAH studies the history of women’s labour activism and organizing of many types and political persuasions to improve the labour conditions and life circumstances of lower- and working-class women and their communities in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, the post-imperial nation states, and during the Cold War and the years thereafter. In this presentation we discuss a crucial element of our ongoing work: How to tie in the individual research pursued by each team member with each other and how to make our research findings into a coherent whole that is intended to be more than the sum of the 10 component studies. First, we introduce how ZARAH combines collaborative and individual elements of the project research through its overall design and then we exemplify how the research of the team members contributes to answering the common research questions guiding our work.

The CVs of all ZARAH team members and descriptions of their component studies can be found here. Susan Zimmermann, the Principal Investigator, is University Professor at the Central European University in Vienna (Austria) and President of the International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH). She is a historian of labour, gender, welfare, and women’s organizations in Central Eastern Europe and internationally during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Her book Women’s politics and men’s trade unionism. International gender politics, female IFTU trade unionists and the workers' and women’s movements of the interwar period was published (in German) in 2021.

Links:

• SOCIOBORD Website

Attachments:

• Programme