The Slovak American Society of Washington, D.C.
presents:
“Seven Slovak Women: Portraits of Courage, Humanism, and Enlightenment”
with Josette Baer
Saturday, October 23rd at 1:00pm EDT
To register for this event on the Zoom platform, please visit:
https://us06web.zoom.us/
You can find the book at
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/
If you have any questions about the event, please contact info@dcslovaks.org.
In her talk on her book “Seven Slovak Women: Portraits of Courage, Humanism, and Enlightenment,” Professor Baer will discuss her research methods and then introduce us to two of the Slovak women portrayed in her book: Elena Maróthy-Šoltésová, the founder of Živena (founded in 1869), and Chaviva Rejková (a.k.a. Adela Rosenbergová), who was Jewish and a fighter in the Slovak National Uprising during World War II. We will learn about their professional achievements and the difficult political and economic circumstances they had to face. Prof. Baer will conclude her talk with a brief comparison with Czech women of the same historical epoch, as Slovak and Czech women lived in very different political and economic conditions from the mid-19th to the end of the 20th century.
Josette Baer is Adjunct Professor and Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Zurich (UZH), Switzerland. She has formally studied and researched various aspects of Slavic philology, political science, international relations, and the 19th-century intellectual history of the Slavic-speaking nations of Central and Eastern Europe. After receiving a three-year stipend from the Swiss National Science Foundation, she moved to Seattle, where she taught and did research at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. As a fellow of the Open Society Institute, she taught in Minsk (Belarus) and St. Petersburg (Russian Federation). She has taught at the University of Zurich since 2006. Prof. Baer has assessed several scientific projects for the Czech and Slovak National Science foundations and DFG Bonn, and been a peer reviewer for international academic journals. In 2019, the scientific board of the Department of History at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, in Bratislava, elected her a member of the international editorial board of Historický časopis (Historical journal). Her next book will be the first political biography of Hana Ponická, a Slovak writer and dissident.
