Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies

Apply now

Barbara Einhorn

Barbara Einhorn is Professor Emerita of Gender Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK and Adjunct Research Professor at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She has taught at Otago, Monash and Sussex universities and been a visiting professor at Brown University, Rhode Island and the University of Chicago as well as research scholar at Humboldt University Berlin.

Barbara is a firm believer in transdisciplinary research as providing the intellectual space for creative new insights to emerge. She has herself during the course of her academic career crossed several disciplinary boundaries. Barbara holds a PhD from the University of Otago on the novel in East Germany between 1969 and 1989. Although this came under the rubrik of German Literature as a discipline, it was in fact a sociological examination of the relationship between the individual and society. More specifically, her dissertation illustrated through an analysis of narrative perspective the way that relationship shifted during those politically turbulent years, moving away from the dictum of Socialist Realism requiring a commitment to the collective purpose of society’s development, with an optimistic perspective on social progress, to a more nuanced, self-doubting, sceptical view. Curious to understand more about gender issues in Central and Eastern Europe, Barbara then conducted comparative research in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her two monographs on gender equity issues both before and after 1989 are listed below.

Barbara has edited or co-edited a further two monographs and five journal special issues, as well as serving on the editorial boards of International Feminist Journal of Politics, The European Journal of Women’s Studies, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Women’s Studies International Forum, END Journal, Peace Review. She has also acted as a consultant to UNIFEM, the ILO and the World Bank.

Barbara’s current research, entitled ‘Transnational Identity under Observation’, turns the lens on discrimination, persecution and forced migration: https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/stout-centre/research-and-publications2/research-units/transnational-identity-under-observation. Barbara has also previously conducted oral history interviews with a group of people who after fleeing the Nazis, voluntarily re-migrated to (East) Germany after the end of World War 2, as well as with a range of European refugees from Hitler who found refuge in New Zealand.

The current study concerns the ways in which multiple border crossings, when combined with political engagement, especially peace activism, tend to arouse the suspicions of state security organisations, provoking surveillance. Preliminary findings of the research show this to be true of security services in a wide variety of political regimes, be they fascist, state socialist or democratic. Barbara uses her own family across four generations and many geographical and political borders as a case study and will therefore be including the Einhorn family’s experience of surveillance in New Zealand, both as ‘enemy aliens’ during World War 2 and as leftwing peace activists during later years, as well as her own experience of arrest and imprisonment for border-crossing peace activism by the Stasi in East Germany. The study will draw on archival and secondary literature sources, enhanced by family and witness narratives from oral history interviews.

Research interests:

  • Transnational identity, migration and border crossing under scrutiny by state security services in a range of regimes
  • Identity, ‘home’ and belonging in discourses of migration and return
  • Gender, nation and identity
  • The role of gender in peace and conflict
  • Intersections of religion, gender, politics
  • Citizenship, civil society, and women’s movements in pre- and post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe

Selected publications:

2019:
Einhorn, Barbara, ‘Wollen sie mich wirklich verhaften?‘ [‚Do they really intend to arrest me?’], S.  136-149 in: Almut Ilsen und Ruth Leiserowitz (Hg.) Seid doch laut! Die Frauen für den Frieden in Ost- Berlin [Speak Up! The Women for Peace in East Berlin], Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, ISBN 978-3-96289-065-0.

2017:
A Europe of Intolerance or Social Justice? The Uses and Abuses of Gender Today’, Eurozine (5 May): available at http://www.eurozine.com/a-europe-of-intolerance-or-social-justice-the-uses-and-abuses-of-gender-today/:

2013:
‘Citizenship’, pp. 29-35 in: Mary Evans and Carolyn H. Williams (eds) Gender: The Key Concepts, London and New York: Routledge, ISBN978-0-415-66962-7.

2011:
‘Mass Dictatorship and Gender Politics: Is the Outcome Predictable?’ pp.  34-63, lead chapter in Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone (eds) Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-0-2302-4204-3.

2009:
‘Democratization, Nationalism and Citizenship: The Challenge of Gender’, lead chapter, pp.47-66 in: Linda Racioppi and Katherine O’Sullivan See (eds) Gender Politics in Post-Communist Eurasia, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press,
ISBN978-0-87013-866-9.

2008:
Editor and introduction, ‘Questioning the Secular: Religion, Gender, Politics’, Special Issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies, 15 (3) (August).

2006:
Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe: From Dream to Awakening, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 1-4039-9840-X (paperback with extended new introduction July 2010).

2006:
‘Insiders and Outsiders: Within and Beyond the Gendered Nation’, in: Kathy Davis, Mary Evans and Judith Lorber (eds) Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, ISBN 0-7619-4390-0, pp. 198-215.

2003:
‘Gender and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe’ (with Charlotte Sever), International Feminist Journal of Politics, 5(2): 163-190, ISSN 1461-6742 print/1468-4470 online.

2000:
‘Gender, Nation, Landscape and Identity in Narratives of Exile and Return’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 23 (6): 701-713.

1993:
Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe, London and New York: Verso. 280pp., ISBN 0-86091-410-0 (cloth), 0-86091-615-4 (pbk).