Melissa Feinberg

Associate Professor

Ph.D., University of Chicago

At Rutgers since 2008

108 Van Dyck Hall
848-932-8557
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RESEARCH INTERESTS

I am a modern European historian, with particular interests in gender history, Eastern Europe, the history of human rights, political culture, emotions in politics, and the history of feminism. I am currently working on a book entitled Enemies in Our Midst: Fear and the Cold War Division of Europe. This project is about how fear (of spies, traitors, atomic bombs, and even one’s own government) shaped political culture in both Eastern and Western Europe during the first decade of the Cold War.

COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT

Undergraduate

• 510:327 20th Century Europe
• 510:383 Communism and Post-Communism
• 510:391 Human Rights
• 506:402 History Seminar: The Cold War
• 988:260 The Modern Girl

Graduate

• 510:560 PDR in Women's and Gender History
• 510:599 PDR in Modern Europe

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books

• Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918-1950 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006)

Articles and Essays

• “Fantastic Truths, Compelling Lies: Radio Free Europe and the Response to the Slánský Trial in Czechoslovakia” forthcoming in Contemporary European History.
• “Battling for Peace: The Transformation of the Women’s Movement in Cold War Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe,” in Joanna Regulska and Bonnie Smith, eds., Women and Gender in Postwar Europe (London: Routledge, 2012): 16–33.
• “The Survey Project: Researching the Everyday Experiences of Rural Czech Women and Imagining Modernity at the End of the Second World War,” Journal of Women’s History 23, no. 4 (2011): 82–107.
• “Die Durchsetzung einer neuen Welt. Politische Prozesse in Osteuropa, 1948–1954,” in Bernd Greiner, Christian Th. Müller and Dierk Walter, eds. Angst im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2009): 190–219.
• “The New Woman Question: Gender, Nation and Citizenship in the First Czechoslovak Republic” in Mark Cornwall and RJW Evans, eds., Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe 1918–1948 Proceedings of the British Academy 140 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 45-61.
• “Dumplings and Domesticity: Women, Collaboration and Resistance in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” in Nancy Wingfield and Maria Bucur, eds., Gender and War in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 95-110.