Women in Translation Month

Happy Women in Translation Month! Initiated in 2014 by Meytal Radzinski, this year marks the 10-year anniversary of this celebration. WIT Month is an international and inclusive project that aims to get the voices of women — writing in languages other than English — heard, shared and discussed. There is a large gender disparity in translated literature, as demonstrated on the graphs below*. For example, women make up, at most, 34% of translated literature, and only 36% of writing translated into English comes from non-European countries, highlighting the necessary intersectionality of this project.

In honour of this month, we have compiled a collection of some of our titles featuring women in translation down below. These range from women’s narratives to academic research and essays.

*These figures are from the official WIT website but lacks dating. For more information, and an incredible list of further resources, please visit Women in Translation.


Paperback Available in September 2024

Law, History, and Justice

Debating German State Crimes in the Long Twentieth Century

Annette Weinke
Translated from the German by Nicholas Evangelos Levis

“This book is complicated, and not for the beginner. It covers much ground, and quickly. Weinke does not so much create a usable narrative as destroy usable, but unfortunately inaccurate, narratives. Her book should be required reading for anyone producing new scholarship in these fields.” • Journal of Modern History

Read Introduction

Girl in the Pandemic

Paperback Available

Escapees

The History of Jews Who Fled Nazi Deportation Trains in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands

Tanja von Fransecky
Translated from German by Benjamin Liebelt

“Fransecky’s accounts of the individual escapes offer an interesting and important addition to Holocaust literature.” • Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Read Introduction

Cosmopolitan Refugees

Paperback Available

Gulag Memories

The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia’s Repressive Past

Zuzanna Bogumił
Translated from the Polish by Philip Palmer

“[The book’s] considerable value as a contribution to Soviet and post‐Soviet memory studies is undeniable. Bogumił’s work should become a must‐read for everyone who works in the field of the memory of political repressions.” • Soviet & Post-Soviet Politics & Society

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Punching Back

Heirs of the Bamboo

Identity and Ambivalence among the Eurasian Macanese

Marisa C. Gaspar
Translated by Roopanjali Roy

“Focusing on the manipulation of language and food, Marisa Gaspar’s monograph constitutes obligatory reading for anyone who is puzzled by the way in which the past challenges the future and vice versa”. • João Pina-Cabral, University of Kent

Read Introduction

Paperback Available

The France of the Little-Middles

A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris

Marie Cartier, Isabelle Coutant, Olivier Masclet, and Yasmine Siblot
Translated by Juliette Rogers

“[The volume] shows the value of investigating middle-class Western neighborhoods and especially of the historical changes in such sites. The study is a contribution to the anthropology of Europe as well as to urban anthropology and to the anthropology of class, and it usefully complicates and even debunks some preconceptions about suburban life, immigration, class, and politics.” • Anthropology Review Database

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The Women’s Camp in Moringen

A Memoir of Imprisonment in Germany 1936-1937

Gabriele Herz
Translated by Hildegard Herz and Howard Hartig

“These memoirs by Gabriele Herz have great significance in that they describe the experiences of a Jewish woman as well as that of non-Jewish prisoners, as seen by her, during the early years of national-socialist internment policy. In this sense it is a rare document of the literature of memories.”  ·  H-Soz.-u.Kult

The Journalism of Milena Jesenská

A Critical Voice in Interwar Central Europe

Edited and translated from the Czech

“Jesenská’s essays offer firsthand observations on a society that was slowly imploding between the years 1920 and 1939 [and] will certainly encourage lively classroom debates (especially in women’s studies, political science and history courses) concerning politics, the condition of women, and social problems of yesterday and today.”   · Slavic and East European Journal

A Year of Revolutions

Fanny Lewald’s Recollections of 1848

Translated, edited, and annotated by Hanna Ballin Lewis

“… if the reader wishes to hear the street cries of the revolution, climb the barricades …, experience the hopes and anxieties of a city gripped with political uncertainty and stripped of its trees from the boulevards, and witness the actress Rachel Felix sing the Marseillaise at the end of her performance …, then this is the book to buy.”  · French History


To see more of our titles on Gender Studies, follow this link.


Berghahn Journals

Girlhood Studies
An Interdisciplinary Journal

Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls’ lives to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, practitioners in the fields of education, social service and health care and policy makers.

Aspasia
The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 

Special Issue: A Hundred Years of International Women’s Day in CESEE

Aspasia is the international peer-reviewed annual of women’s and gender history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). It aims to transform European women’s and gender history by expanding comparative research on women and gender to all parts of Europe, creating a European history of women and gender that encompasses more than the traditional Western European perspective.


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AUTHOR ARTICLE: Researching Remembrance

Alex Tomić discusses her new book, The Legacy of Serbia’s Great War: Politics and Remembrance, which examines the centenary events memorializing the First World War with the retreat at its core and provides a persuasive account of the ways in which the remembrance of Serbian history has been manipulated for political purposes. 


I started researching the remembrance of the First World War in Serbia in the run up to the centenary, just over ten years ago. Apart from reading, classifying and analysing, I also needed to visit some of the sites of remembrance, attend ceremonies, museum openings, concerts… whatever I was able to manage while working full-time in the Hague. My husband (was) volunteered as a travelling companion so for the next few years our holidays were spent visiting First World War monuments, usually located at military cemeteries. Apart from places in Serbia and Greece, we also visited memorial sites in France, Belgium, Slovenia, Italy and the Netherlands (although the Netherlands was neutral, there is a twist in Chapter 8 …). Some trips stand out.

Continue reading “AUTHOR ARTICLE: Researching Remembrance”

Spring Paperbacks!

Unique studies at budget-friendly prices, these March and April paperbacks are great for adoptions and reading lists. If you want to evaluate their usefulness on a course you teach, please request a digital examination copy: just click through and look for the green ‘Request a review or examination copy’ button. Open Access titles are, of course, freely available to download any time.

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Celebrating International Day for Monuments & Sites, also known as World Heritage Day!

Celebrated yearly on April 18th, the International Day for Monuments and Sites, also known as World Heritage Day, encourages local communities and individuals throughout the world to consider the importance of cultural heritage to their lives and to promote awareness of its diversity and vulnerability and the efforts required to protect and conserve it. For information on this year’s theme please visit ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) webpage www.icomos.org.

In joining the celebration, Berghahn is excited to present relevant Heritage Studies titles and Journals, as well as highlight our Explorations in Heritage Studies series.

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Spotlight: Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975), German-American philosopher and political theorist, was the first to argue that there were continuities between the age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe. In her pivotal work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), she established that theories of race, notions of racial and cultural superiority, and the right of ‘superior races’ to expand territorially were themes that connected the white settler colonies, the other imperial possessions, and the fascist ideologies of post-Great War Europe.

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Making Connections: Reflections on Writing Towards a Collaborative Memory

Sara Jones, University of Birmingham

The idea for Towards a Collaborative Memory came when I was researching my last book on memories of the East German Stasi. I was reading press releases from the Stasi Prison Memorial at Berlin Hohenschönhausen and came across one in which the then Director of the Memorial used a visit to memorials in the Czech Republic to criticise German memory culture. I had spent a long time researching memorials in Germany – especially Hohenschönhausen –  but had never really considered how they collaborated with partners in other countries and how they might use those collaborations to further their own politics of memory.

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Readings on Ukraine

On the third anniversary of the start of the war in Ukraine, in solidarity and in an effort to deepen knowledge in social and cultural history of Ukraine, we are offering free access to these relevant journal articles and book chapters that focus on social and historical issues in Ukraine.


Carnage and Care on the Eastern Front: The War Diaries of Bernhard Bardach, 1914-1918
Bernhard Bardach
Translated and Edited by Peter C. Appelbaum

[A] significant historical document and much-welcomed source for scholars of the military, social, and material history of World War I. It is also a valuable record for everyone interested in the history of war on the territories of present-day Ukraine and the eastern front in general […] • Harvard Ukrainian Studies


Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989
Gaëlle Fisher

Located on the border of present-day Romania and Ukraine, the historical region of Bukovina was the site of widespread displacement and violence as it passed from Romanian to Soviet hands and back again during World War II. This study focuses on two groups of “Bukovinians”—ethnic Germans and German-speaking Jews—as they navigated dramatically changed political and social circumstances in and after 1945. Through comparisons of the narratives and self-conceptions of these groups, this book gives a nuanced account of how they dealt with the difficult legacies of World War II, while exploring Bukovina’s significance for them as both a geographical location and a “place of memory.”


New Imaginaries: Youthful Reinvention of Ukraine’s Cultural Paradigm
Edited and Translated by Marian J. Rubchak

Having been spared the constraints imposed on intellectual discourse by the totalitarian regime of the past, young Ukrainian scholars now engage with many Western ideological theories and practices in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and uncensored scholarship. Displacing the Soviet legacy of prescribed thought and practices, this volume’s female contributors have infused their work with Western elements, although vestiges of Soviet-style ideas, research methodology, and writing linger. The result is the articulation of a “New Imaginaries” — neither Soviet nor Western — that offers a unique approach to the study of gender by presenting a portrait of Ukrainian society as seen through the eyes of a new generation of feminist scholars.


De-Commemoration: Removing Statues and Renaming Places
Edited by Sarah Gensburger and Jenny Wüstenberg

“[A]n inspirational collection of diverse approaches, practices, methods, and perspectives of de-commemoration of forgoing heroes and activities, set in various cultural and geographical contexts. This is an exceedingly rare and truly global contribution.” • Mariusz Czepczyński, University of Gdańsk

  • Additional Recommendation: Chapter 7. Contrasting Fates of Lenin Statues in Ukraine and Russia by Dominique Colas

Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives
Edited by Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak

In studies of a common European past, there is a significant lack of scholarship on the former Eastern Bloc countries. While understanding the importance of shifting the focus of European memory eastward, contributors to this volume avoid the trap of Eastern European exceptionalism, an assumption that this region’s experiences are too unique to render them comparable to the rest of Europe. They offer a reflection on memory from an Eastern European historical perspective, one that can be measured against, or applied to, historical experience in other parts of Europe. In this way, the authors situate studies on memory in Eastern Europe within the broader debate on European memory.


Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice
Jessica Rapson

Commentary on memorials to the Holocaust has been plagued with a sense of “monument fatigue”, a feeling that landscape settings and national spaces provide little opportunity for meaningful engagement between present visitors and past victims. This book examines the Holocaust via three sites of murder by the Nazis: the former concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany; the mass grave at Babi Yar, Ukraine; and the razed village of Lidice, Czech Republic. Bringing together recent scholarship from cultural memory and cultural geography, the author focuses on the way these violent histories are remembered, allowing these sites to emerge as dynamic transcultural landscapes of encounter in which difficult pasts can be represented and comprehended in the present. This leads to an examination of the role of the environment, or, more particularly, the ways in which the natural environment, co-opted in the process of killing, becomes a medium for remembrance.


Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Contemporary Ukraine
Edited by Marian J. Rubchak

Drawn from various disciplines and a broad spectrum of research interests, these essays reflect on the challenging issues confronting women in Ukraine today. The contributors are an interdisciplinary, transnational group of scholars from gender studies, feminist theory, history, anthropology, sociology, women’s studies, and literature. Among the issues they address are: the impact of migration, education, early socialization of gender roles, the role of the media in perpetuating and shaping negative stereotypes, the gendered nature of language, women and the media, literature by women, and local appropriation of gender and feminist theory. Each author offers a fresh and unique perspective on the current process of survival strategies and postcommunist identity reconstruction among Ukrainian women in their current climate of patriarchalism.


Journal Articles

Berghahn Journals is offering free access to the following relevant articles.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN CULTURES

Geopolitical Transition of the European Body in Ukraine
Nadzeya Husakouskaya (Vol. 28, Issue 1)
DOI: 10.3167/ajec.2019.280110

Open Access!
ASPASIA

Love and Sex in Wartime: Controlling Women’s Sexuality in the Ukrainian Nationalist Underground
Marta Havryshko (Vol. 12)
DOI: 10.3167/asp.2018.120103

FOCAAL

Underground waterlines: Explaining political quiescence of Ukrainian labor unions
Denys Gorbach (Vol. 2019, Issue 84)
DOI: 10.3167/fcl.2019.840103

GERMAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY

The Ampel Coalition’s Foreign Policy Challenges
Jack Janes (Vol. 40, Issue 4)
DOI: 10.3167/gps.2022.400405

Inertia and Reactiveness in Germany’s Russia Policy: From the 2021 Federal Election to the Invasion of Ukraine in 2022
Jonas J. Driedger (Vol. 40, Issue 4)
DOI: 10.3167/gps.2022.400407

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL QUALITY

Special Issue: A Thematic Issue about Central and Eastern European Societies (Vol. 10, Issue 2)

Social Quality in a Transitive Society: The Role of the State
Valeriy Heyets (Vol. 9, Issue 1)
DOI: 10.3167/IJSQ.2019.090103

Four Dimensions of Societal Transformation: An Introduction to the Problematique of Ukraine
Zuzana Novakova (Vol. 7, Issue 2)
DOI: 10.3167/IJSQ.2017.070202

LEARNING AND TEACHING

Global inequality and policy selectivity in the periphery: The case of Ukrainian reforms in higher education
Viktoriia Muliavka (Vol. 12, Issue 1)
DOI: 10.3167/latiss.2019.120104

REGIONS AND COHESION

The Ukrainian divide: The power of historical narratives, imagined communities, and collective memories
Alina Penkala, Ilse Derluyn, and Ine Lietaert (Vol. 10, Issue 3)
DOI: 10.3167/reco.2020.100311

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGIE SOCIALE

Liberalism in fragments: Oligarchy and the liberal subject in Ukrainian news journalism
Taras Fedirko (Vol. 29, Issue 2)
DOI: 10.1111/1469-8676.13063


In recognition of VE Day

Victory in Europe Day is the day celebrating the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Germany’s unconditional surrender of its armed forces on Tuesday, 8 May 1945, marking defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of Second World War in Europe.

In recognition of the day Berghahn is pleased to offer a selection of our WWII History books, including a selection of Open Access titles. In addition, Berghahn Journals would like to highlight relevant special issues from select history journals.

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