Book Launch - Anna Dobrowolska: Polish Sexual Revolutions
We are inviting you to a book launch of Anna Dobrowolska’s (University of Basel) new book Polish Sexual Revolutions: Negotiating Sexuality and Modernity behind the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2025). We will be joined by the author and two other experts, Zsófia Lóránd (University of Vienna) and Ella Rossman (GWZO Prague), who will bring their Yugoslav and Soviet expertise, respectively, onboard. The discussion will be chaired by Martin Babička (Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
The debate will take place on the 11th of February from 6 pm at Skautský institut, Staroměstské náměstí 4, in the “Ludvík” Hall on the third floor in the back of the corridor. Follow the signs and come early to get a drink at the bar on the first floor.
Polish Sexual Revolutions: Negotiating Sexuality and Modernity behind the Iron Curtain studies the history of sexuality in state-socialist Poland in its European and global context, focusing on how communism transformed both sexual discourses and intimate practices between 1945 and 1989. It reconfigures our understanding of the sexual revolution, departing from the case study of Poland to complicate our understanding of ‘sexual modernity’ and ‘progress’. Engaging with the most recent scholarship on sexuality in East Central Europe, the monograph reassesses the role played by communist states in modernising their citizens’ approaches to sex. Contrary to the stereotype which perceives East Central Europe as ‘lagging behind’ the West in sexual matters and having to ‘catch up’ after 1989, the book sheds light on the ambiguous histories of state-socialist entanglements with sex to showcase alternative visions of sexual liberation. By focusing on forgotten genealogies of discussions of sexuality, the monograph historicizes the roots of contemporary debates on sex education, LGBTQ+, and women’s rights in the region.
Dr Anna Dobrowolska is a postdoctoral assistant at the Department of History, University of Basel. She holds a DPhil in history from the University of Oxford, and her research focuses on the history of sexuality, visual culture, and gender under state socialism. Between 2021 and 2024, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, an EUI-IHEID Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute, and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Warsaw. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, Rethinking History, and Aspasia. In 2024, she received the Polish Science Foundation’s START Fellowship for young researchers.
Dr Zsófia Lóránd is Associate Professor at the Department of Contemporary History and Research Center for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna. She is an intellectual historian of feminism in post-WWII state-socialist Eastern Europe.
Dr Ella Rossman is a researcher at the Department ‘Knowledge and Participation’ of the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, based in Prague. She specialises in women’s and gender history, the history of feminism, LGBTQ history, and the history of the Soviet Union.
This event is organised by the Research Group for Historical Transformation Studies, Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
