Teaching empires: Gender and transnational citizenship in Europe

The idea of Teaching Empires originated during the 6th Gender Research Conference in Łódź, Poland, when Teaching with Memories (2006) was launched by Working Group 1b4 Athena 2. The book has been a success in European teaching and a third printing (2007) is distributed internationally by Syracuse University Press. Many contributors felt that their deep commitment to teaching and a good working atmosphere needed a new project. Since then, the Working Group, Teaching Empires, met at the annual Athena meetings in Budapest in 2006 and in Madrid in 2007. Members of the working group devised teaching exercises, shared local experiences and memories of empire, made presentations of their teaching materials and drew upon the commentary and questions of peers. An important first step, for instance, was to devise an inventory of courses on empire being taught in higher education. Thanks to funding from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and co-sponsorship by the Centre for Gender Studies at Stockholm University, the group was given the opportunity to have an extra workshop on “Women and Transnational Citizenship: Researching Teaching Empires” at Stockholm University, in May 2008. The workshop was also dedicated to preparing for the teaching at the Central European University in Budapest in the autumn term of 2008. In Budapest, over the course of the autumn term, members of the Working Group offered a course, “Women and Transnational citizenship, Teaching Empires”, to post-graduate students of gender. Exploring the internet as a site for teaching at the CEU, we developed a moodle e-learning platform where we uploaded the teaching material as well as films connected to the themes of the course. Students were required to address one film in relation to their chosen topic in the final paper in order to ensure that the visual was represented.