War Heroes Became Deserters and War Whores Turned Into Singing Babushkas: Displaced Persons and Gender in Cold War Belgium
Guest Lecturer Machteld Venken
In the aftermath of the Second World War, many displaced persons moved to Belgium, including soldiers who had fought in a Polish armoured division with the Allied forces and former female forced labourers from the Soviet Union. These immigrant men and women married Belgian citizens. The presentation describes how Machteld Venken researched and compared the migrants’ attempts to give meaning to their war experiences in post-war life, as well as the various processes they used to understand and articulate what they had been through. As the author found out, these processes were shaped not only by the characteristics of the war experiences themselves, but also by the changing positions these migrants held within their home and host societies. Adopting the perspective of these newcomers to Belgium, this transnational and comparative study examines how they gathered in groups in order to remember their war experiences, and how they were integrated into, and/or excluded from, their home and host societies over time.
About the Author
Machteld Venken is a Professor of Contemporary Transnational History at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH). She studied Slavic Languages and Cultures, European Studies and History in Belgium, Poland and Ukraine. Venken obtained her PhD in 2008 at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and her accreditation to supervise research in 2018 at the University of Vienna in Austria. She has been a Principal Investigator of eight funded research projects in four European countries. Venken joined the University of Luxembourg in November 2019 after a Visiting Scholarship at the Imre Kertesz Kolleg/Institute of Advanced Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany and an Attract Brains for Brussels Fellowship at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels in Belgium. Her main research interests are transnational, transregional and comparative histories of Europe, migration, borderlands, oral history, the history of families and children, and citizen science.
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