The Max Weber Network Eastern Europe (MWNO) Georgia branch office, in cooperation with the Turpanjian Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) at the American University of Armenia (AUA) is hosting an international conference and calling for papers on Women’s Education, Careers, and Social Change in the Russian and Ottoman Empires and Beyond.
About the Topic
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women’s access to education and professional opportunities remained uneven across the Russian and Ottoman Empires. At the same time, growing opportunities for study abroad created new pathways of mobility linking minority communities with educational centers in Switzerland, Germany, France, and elsewhere in Western Europe. The conference examines women’s access to education, educational mobility, professional opportunities, and the social debates surrounding these processes by focusing on national and confessional minorities, including Armenian, Georgian, Jewish, Polish, and other groups. It covers the period from the 1860s to the 1920s, encompassing both the final decades of the empires and the profound political and social transformations that followed the First World War.
Women’s Education, Careers, and Social Change in the Russian and Ottoman Empires and Beyond, 1860s–1920s
The historiography of women’s education has increasingly approached educational mobility as a socially embedded process shaped by social networks, linguistic and cultural adaptation, admission regulations, and the circulation of ideas, practices, and professional models. Although this field has expanded considerably in recent decades, national and confessional minorities have often been subsumed within broader imperial categories, leaving group-specific patterns of educational mobility, professional opportunities, and participation in public life insufficiently differentiated.
Adopting a cross-regional and comparative perspective, the conference seeks to explore the visibility and invisibility of female actors in educational, professional, and public life. We invite proposals addressing women’s education, educational mobility, professional opportunities, and public debates across ethnic, national, religious, and imperial boundaries. Comparative and transimperial perspectives, as well as biographical, microhistorical, and prosopographical approaches, are especially welcome, as are papers based on ego-documents, correspondence, autobiographical writings, institutional records, student publications, periodicals, and quantitative sources.
By bringing into dialogue research on women’s education, educational mobility, knowledge transfer, and professional opportunities among national and confessional minorities, the conference aims to contribute to gender history, the history of education, migration studies, intellectual history, and the history of knowledge. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Access and Restrictions: education and mobility among national and confessional minorities in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, the role of girls’ schools, teacher seminaries, denominational schools, and advanced women’s courses.
- Mobility and Transimperial Networks: educational migration between the Russian and Ottoman Empires and Western Europe; intellectual, philanthropic, religious, familial, and student networks facilitating educational opportunities and mobility.
- Everyday Experiences Abroad: social interactions, adaptation, intellectual sociability, student associations, and the formation of professional and political networks.
- Discrimination and Exclusion: experiences of gender-based discrimination, antisemitism, and other forms of exclusion, and their influence on educational mobility, career opportunities, and social participation.
- Methodological Approaches: statistical analyses of educational mobility, institutional distribution, fields of study, and mobility patterns; biographical, microhistorical, and prosopographical studies of women’s educational mobility, intellectual networks, and social agency.
- Knowledge Transfer and Intellectual Exchange: women as mediators of knowledge, translation, dissemination, adaptation, and intellectual exchange in national, imperial, and transnational contexts
- Professionalization and Careers: women’s entry into academic and non-academic professions, including teaching, medicine, journalism, publishing, and social work.
- Political and Civic Engagement: women’s participation in political movements, reform circles, socialist organizations, women’s associations, philanthropic initiatives, and other forms of civic engagement.
- Public Debates: discussions of women’s education, mobility, gender roles, morality, family, national identity, religious tradition, and social respectability.
Submission Guidelines
The conference invites proposals for 20-minute papers, and abstracts should be 250–300 words, and include a short biographical note of no more than 100 words.
Important Dates:
Abstract Submission Deadline: August 10, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: August 31, 2026
The conference will take place from December 3-4 2026, at AUA
Send Applications to:
Arpine.Maniero@collegium-carolinum.de
For Organizational Questions Contact
Concept and Organization
Dr. Arpine Maniero, Research Associate, Collegium Carolinum e.V., Munich
Organizing Committee Members:
PD Dr. Moritz Florin, Deputy Director of the Max Weber Network Eastern Europe, Head of the Georgia Branch Office
Dr. Arpine Maniero, Research Associate, Collegium Carolinum e.V., Munich
Dr. Tigran Matosyan, Assistant Professor, American University of Armenia
Dr. Naira Sahakyan, Associate Professor, Interim Director, TISS, American University of Armenia
Language
The working language of the conference will be in English