History
The history of teaching gender studies at IEAS goes back to the early 1990s. The first course in gender studies was launched in 1993, when Nóra Séllei returned from her TEMPUS exchange scholarship at the University of Hull, UK, where she had a formative experience: encountered a team of scholars, Marion Shaw, Patsy Stoneman and Angela Leighton, who launched an MA programme in “Women and Literature”. Having developed close and long-lasting working relationships with them, and gaining new ones as well, GSC has had international support from acknowledged scholars. Parallel with this, further colleagues entered the discipline at IEAS and started to apply approaches informed by gender studies in the research.
The gender studies team at IEAS has become known nationally and internationally. They maintain contacts with other Hungarian centres of gender studies (IEAS, University of Szeged; Centre for Gender and Culture, Corvinus University, Budapest, Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest) and with international scholars as well. We have had visiting scholars either for one-off lectures or for doing whole courses: Marion Shaw (currently Emeritus Professor, University of Loughborough, UK), Patsy Stoneman (currently Emeritus Reader, University of Hull, UK), Angela Leighton (professor, University of Cambridge), Ann Heilmann (professor, University of Hull, UK), Ruth Evans (professor, University of Stirling, Scotland), Mark Llewellyn (University of Liverpool), and Eleanor Bell (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland). But we also keep contacts in the Central-Eastern European region: with the Department of English at the Catholic University, Ruzomberok, Slovakia, the University of the West, Timisoara, Romania, Masaryk University, Brno, the Czech Republic, Comenius Egyetem, Bratislva, Slovakia, Burgenland Research Centre, Eisenstadt, Austria, and beyond: Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Canakkale, Turkey.