Gender und Empire

Scholars have been exploring the history of women, gender and empire for more than three decades. Starting off by questioning the notion of colonialism as an exclusively male endeavor, they did not just add the stories of white and colonized women to the historiography on empire. They explored the effects of colonization on indigenous and migrant women and stressed the centrality of western women to the imperial project, but went on to expose colonialism itself as a fundamentally gendered project. However, despite the large body of literature that has been produced over years the history of gender and empire is far from told. On the contrary, the amount of scholarship has only served to reveal the complexity of colonial gender practices, relations and ideologies.

Focusing on how gender intersected with other social categories such as race, class, religion and sexuality the conference will reexamine the interconnected histories of gender and empire. At the same time we strive for a comparative perspective of the subject in order to address similarities and differences between various colonial and imperial settings.

The papers deal with key issues of colonial and gender history such as intimacy, sexuality, war, labor or education. They focus on various imperial formations from “typical” colonies in Africa or Asia, to settler colonial settings and imperial peripheries within Europe or Asia.

The conference will be held in English. Participation is for free, but please register till August 13th, 2015 since we have only limited seats available at our venue. For registration, please contact: dlerp@uni-koeln.de or aklein23@smail.uni-koeln.de