Call for Papers

Gendering Russia’s Wars in the 20^th–21^st Centuries

Interdisciplinary conference
September 23–24, 2027
University of Turku, Finland
In-person only

This conference invites scholars from different disciplines to explore the intersection of gender and warfare across the history of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation from the early twentieth century to the present. We aim to bring scholars from different disciplines together in conversation about the different ways in which gender intersects with representations of Russia’s wars in visual, literary, historical, and media discourses.

This conference is grounded in the premise that gender is crucial to understanding war as both a lived and a narrated experience. In recent decades, scholarship on war has increasingly incorporated cultural and gender-sensitive perspectives, highlighting how military conflicts are not only political and strategic events but are deeply embedded in systems of societal gender order. Gender can be mobilized to both justify and resist warfare, as illustrated by Second World War propaganda or by the contemporary feminist anti-war movements.

The conference seeks to examine the changes and continuities in gendered representations of Russia’s wars across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We welcome contributions exploring gendered representations and self-representations during wartime, including the First World War; the Russian Civil War; the Second World War; the Soviet–Afghan War; the Chechen Wars; Russia’s war against Ukraine; and other military conflicts of this period.

We are inviting proposals addressing (but not limited to) the following themes:

• gender archetypes in war (e.g. Mother Russia)
• the use of gender to justify or oppose war
• silenced and marginalized gender experiences and representations
• women at the front and at the home front
• experiences of displacement
• self-representations in ego-documents
• gendered representations in textual, visual, and digital sources
• gender and war in imperial/national and central/regional discourses
• continuity and change in gendered cultural patterns across Russia’s wars
• sexuality and the body in war
• cultural memory
• the rhetoric and language of war
• anti-war and pacifist movements
• religion and gender in wartime

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words and a CV of no more than two pages to women-war@utu.fi by March 15, 2027. Applicants will be notified of the decision by the end of April 2027.

Keynote speakers:

• Karen Petrone is a Professor of History and Zantker Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Kentucky, USA, and co-director of the UK-JHF Holocaust Education Initiative. She is the author of Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Indiana University Press, 2000) and The Great War in Russian Memory (Indiana University Press, 2011), and is currently working on a manuscript entitled Reading War Memory in Putin’s Russia.
• Sari Näre is an Adjunct Professor of Sociology at University of Helsinki, Finland, and a researcher of wartime experiences and emotional heritage. She is the author of Sex and War. Sexual Narratives of Frontline Soldiers from Winter War and Continuation War (Tammi, 2016) and Helsinki in Blood: Women, Children and Young People in the War of 1918 (Tammi, 2018). Her latest book, Wars through the Eyes of My Ancestresses (Docendo, 2025), connects family genealogy with war history.

The organizing committee is unable to subsidize the participants’ travel and accommodation expenses. The conference fee of €80 will cover refreshments and a reception on the first day of the conference. The language of the conference is English. Selected contributions will be invited for consideration for publication in a peer-reviewed edited volume.

This conference is made possible by generous support from the Kone Foundation through the project Revealing Official and Alternative Gender Discourses: Women’s (Self)Representations in Russia’s Wars, 1914–2024.