[Gesth-l] Testimonies and emotionality

[petoand at t-online.hu]

CELEBRATING THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF GENDER STUDIES AND 
THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF CEU
 

THE DEPARTMENT OF GENDER STUDIES PROUDLY PRESENTS THE LECTURE SERIES

VOICING GENDERS, ENGENDERING VOICES


“Testimonies and Emotionality”
A public lecture by

Andrea Pető

Associate Professor, Department of Gender Studies


March 21, 2011, 3:30 pm, Auditorium



The talk covers the history of post-WWII transitional justice period as a space where the full 
emotional burden of the crimes committed during World War II was manifested. Trials were 
crucial institutions in post WWII normalisation because they were redefining citizenship and 
served as civilized form of hate to create emotional standards of that time. Based on an analysis 
of transcripts of people’s tribunals, the talk seeks to connect the emotions; cultural meanings 
and social organization (the post-WWII people’s tribunals in Hungary) that were expected to “deal 
with” the emotion of hate from both by the perpetrators and by the victims, with the aim of 
preventing social explosions, such as lynching, and in order to “normalize” the post-war situation. 
The lecture explains the construction of a divided memory and competing narratives about World 
War II, by showing how the testimonies given at people’s tribunals served as a space for the 
articulation of emotions, while shaping the discourses on emotions and on emotional 
normalization.


Andrea PETŐ is an associate professor at the Department of Gender Studies. She published 
three monographs in Hungarian, English, German and Bulgarian, edited twelve volumes in 
English, six volumes in Hungarian, two in Russian. Her works appeared in different languages, 
including Bulgarian, Croatian, English, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Russian 
and Serbian. She serves on the board of several journals in the field of women's history (Gender 
and History, Clio) and Contemporary European History. She was awarded by President of the 
Hungarian Republic with the Officer’s Cross Order of Merit of The Republic of Hungary in 2005 
and Bolyai Prize by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2006.



The Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices lecture series is a joint celebration of the 
Department’s 15th anniversary and the 20th anniversary of CEU. The lecture series shares our 
diverse faculty’s most recent research with the wider academic community and showcases the 
multiple and interdisciplinary ways in which our field contributes to the themes of CEU’s 
university-wide celebrations: disciplinary self-reflexivity and academia’s social responsibility. 
Thus our lecture series is intended to contribute to the larger intellectual debates initiated in 
celebration of CEU’s 20th anniversary.