Andrea Pető (born 1964) is a Hungarian historian. She is a professor in the Department of Gender Studies at
Central European University
Central European University (CEU) is a private research university accredited in Austria, Hungary, and the United States, with campuses in Vienna and Budapest. The university is known for its highly intensive programs in the social science ...
and a Doctor at Science of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Recognized as a leading scholar on political extremism and how it shapes the collective memory of society, Pető's work evaluates contemporary society from an inter-disciplinary and gendered perspective. She has analyzed the effects of
Nazism
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) i ...
and
Stalinism on Hungary and Eastern Europe, as well as the participation of women in those movements. Pető has been recognized for her scholarly contributions with the Officer's Cross of the
Hungarian Order of Merit,
Bolyai Prize The International János Bolyai Prize of Mathematics is an international prize founded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The prize is named after János Bolyai and is awarded every five years to mathematicians for monographs with important new r ...
of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the
Madame de Staël Prize of the
All European Academies
All European Academies (ALLEA) is the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities. It was founded in 1994, and brings together more than 50 Academies of Sciences and Learned Societies from over 40 member countries of the Council o ...
.
Early life and education
Pető graduated
with honors in 1987 from
Eötvös Loránd University with a
master's degree
A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice. in history, culture, and civilization. She went on to study sociology graduating with honors in 1989 from the
Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences, since 2004 known as the Corvinus University of Budapest. Between 1987 and 1991, she worked as a research fellow at the Hungarian
Institute of Political History
The Institute of Political History ( hu, Politikatörténeti Intézet, PTI), the legal successor of the former Institute of Party History ( hu, Párttörténeti Intézet) is a left-wing public utility private research institute and think-tank loc ...
and in 1991 was hired as an academic coordinator for the history department at the
Central European University
Central European University (CEU) is a private research university accredited in Austria, Hungary, and the United States, with campuses in Vienna and Budapest. The university is known for its highly intensive programs in the social science ...
. Pető obtained a
PhD,
summa cum laude, in contemporary history from
Eötvös Loránd University in 1992 and repeated the distinction with a second PhD in 2000. Between 2001 and 2002, she was a
Jean Monnet Fellow of the
European Institute
The European Institute is a nonpartisan public policy organization dedicated to Transatlantic relations. The Institute was founded in 1989 and is based in Washington, D.C. It regularly hosts forums, roundtable discussions, and programs with po ...
of
Florence
Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany Regions of Italy, region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilan ...
, Italy.
Career
Between 2002 and 2008, she taught as an associate professor at the
University of Miskolc
The University of Miskolc (before 1990: ''Technical University of Heavy Industry'') is the largest university of Northern Hungary.
Location
Most of the buildings can be found in Egyetemváros ("University Town"), a part of the city of Miskolc. I ...
and served as the director of the Gender Studies and Equal Opportunities Center at Miskolc University between 2004 and 2008. Simultaneously between 2003 and 2005, she was an assistant professor at the Central European University, teaching gender studies. In 2005 she
habilitated at Eötvös Loránd University earning her degree in contemporary history. From 2005 to 2015, Pető was an associate professor at Central European University, and in the latter year was promoted to full professor. In 2014, she was awarded the title of doctor of science of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences. As a guest lecturer, she has taught courses in women's and oral history at the universities of
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...
, Frankfurt,
Novi Sad
Novi Sad ( sr-Cyrl, Нови Сад, ; hu, Újvidék, ; german: Neusatz; see below for other names) is the second largest city in Serbia and the capital of the autonomous province of Vojvodina. It is located in the southern portion of the Pan ...
, Stockholm, and Toronto, among others and given lecture throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
Research
Pető researches gender and has become a leading figure in gender studies for Central and Eastern Europe. She is particularly interested in examining political extremism and has analyzed both
Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
and
Stalinist persecutions and their effects on society through the lens of gender. For example, her award-winning 2003 ''Napasszonyok és holdkisasszonyok'' (''Sun Ladies and Moon Maidens'') examined the paradox of politically conservative women. In traditional Hungarian society, politics was a man's domain, but by supporting conservative values, women were able to gain power within the masculine system. She built on the theme in the 2014 work, ''Political Justice in Budapest after World War II'' (originally published in 2012 in Hungarian), written with Ildikó Barna, which examined cases brought before the
people's tribunal and their impact on post-war Jewish identity. Many of the cases tried challenge the collective memory of the period that the Jewish population used the courts to extract revenge for war atrocities. They found that a majority of the cases, which typically dealt with
Nazi collaboration or theft of Jewish property, ended in acquittal. Examined evidence showed that the authorities adhered to a policy of avoiding even the term Jewish. Their analysis also showed that despite perceptions that the courts were dominated by men with a
mob mentality
Herd mentality, mob mentality or pack mentality describes how people can be influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors on a largely emotional, rather than rational, basis. When individuals are affected by mob mentality, they may make dif ...
, there was high participation by women both as accusers and accused. In addition, they found that women who supported traditional roles for society, typically received lighter sentences.
In her 2018 work, ''Elmondani az elmondhatatlant a nemi erőszak története Magyarországon a II. világháború alatt'' (Speaking of the Unspeakable: The Story of Sexual Violence in Hungary During World War II), Pető examines
wartime sexual violence
Wartime sexual violence is rape or other forms of sexual violence committed by combatants during armed conflict, war, or military occupation often as spoils of war, but sometimes, particularly in ethnic conflict, the phenomenon has broader ...
. Her analysis dismisses the easy answer of male aggression or punishment of otherness, noting that it was not simply invaders who raped and plundered Hungarian women during the war. Pető's evaluation confirmed that ethnicity was not a driving factor, but that the increased levels of rapes were driven by alcohol consumption, lax military discipline, and "the fact that the
occupying Soviet army fell outside of Hungarian
egal Egal or Égal may refer to:
People
* Ali Sugule Egal (1936–2016), Somali composer, poet and playwright
* Fabienne Égal (born 1954), French announcer and television host
* Liban Abdi Egal, Somali entrepreneur
* Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal (1928– ...
jurisdiction". She documented that women soldiers participated in the sexual violence and that their participation had largely been erased from the collective memory of the period largely because of the taboo of
male rape
A proportion of victims of rape or other sexual violence incidents are male. Historically, rape was thought to be, and defined as, a crime committed solely against females. This belief is still held in some parts of the world, but rape of male ...
. Continuing the theme of the invisibility in the historical narrative, her work ''The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War'' explores how and why the perpetrators of the Massacre at 64 Csengery Street on 15 October 1944 became prominent or invisible. Pető argues that the manipulation of the memories of the event paved the way for the re-emergence of far right movements in the twenty-first century.
Activism
Pető visited Novi Sad, Serbia in 2003 to promote her book on the history of women's organizations which operated in Hungary between 1945 and 1951. While she was there, she witnessed a feminist walk which followed a map giving locations where important women lived, women's associations operated, and women's monuments stood, and decided to create a similar walk for Budapest. Research was required, as women's associations had been barred by the communist regime beginning in 1945 and few monuments to women exist in the city. Pető uses the tours to serve as both a teaching method and activism, recognizing that monuments and memory are a reflection of politics and power relationships. Her tours inspired students to make a similar map of lesbian spaces in 2017, using the records of the
Labrisz Lesbian Association to locate important landmarks to the community. Pető has also voiced opposition to "
right to be forgotten
The right to be forgotten (RTBF) is the right to have private information about a person be removed from Internet searches and other directories under some circumstances. The concept has been discussed and put into practice in several jurisdiction ...
" policies in the
European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...
, when they have to do with global events, such as the Holocaust and war crimes.
Pető's work on political extremism has been challenging since the 2010 election of
Viktor Orbán
Viktor Mihály Orbán (; born 31 May 1963) is a Hungarian politician who has served as prime minister of Hungary since 2010, previously holding the office from 1998 to 2002. He has presided over Fidesz since 1993, with a brief break between ...
as
Prime Minister of Hungary
The prime minister of Hungary ( hu, Magyarország miniszterelnöke) is the head of government of Hungary. The prime minister and the Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Parliament, to their political part ...
. His conservative stance has limited academic freedom, curtailed
freedom of the press, eroded
judicial independence and attempted to control public institutions and
non-governmental organization
A non-governmental organization (NGO) or non-governmental organisation (see American and British English spelling differences#-ise, -ize (-isation, -ization), spelling differences) is an organization that generally is formed independent from g ...
s. Pető argues that by replacing diverse organizations that represented broad perspectives of different social sectors, the government created organizations which imposed specific identity requirements upon participants to receive funding. Following, they created research institutions peopled by those who ignored scientific protocols so that findings produced the narrative desired by the state, and eliminated independent publishing houses. The
illiberal democracy
An illiberal democracy describes a governing system in which, although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties; thus it does not co ...
which has emerged has been strongly criticized by Pető. She has written for newspapers and magazines about the curtailment of women's rights, including the attempts to roll back abortion services which were first legalized in Hungary in 1945 in response to war-time sexual violence.
Anti-immigration policies of the government led to rising
xenophobia
Xenophobia () is the fear or dislike of anything which is perceived as being foreign or strange. It is an expression of perceived conflict between an in-group and out-group and may manifest in suspicion by the one of the other's activities, a ...
and caused backlash against immigrants and refugees in the country. As a response to government inaction, the Central European University staff and students collected funds and opened their doors to the refugees fleeing to Hungary from Serbia since 2015. In 2018, the Central European University was forcibly barred from operating in Budapest and relocated to
Vienna
en, Viennese
, iso_code = AT-9
, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
, postal_code =
, timezone = CET
, utc_offset = +1
, timezone_DST ...
. In 2021, in response to a plan to reduce qualifications for teacher training and a censorship request to remove comments critical of the
European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education
The European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA), formerly the European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, was established as an organization to represent quality assurance and accreditation organisations ...
in an upcoming article, Pető resigned her position on the Hungarian
Accreditation Committee, on which she had served since 2018.
Awards and honors
Pető was awarded the Officer's Cross of the
Hungarian Order of Merit in 2005, and the following year received the
Bolyai Prize The International János Bolyai Prize of Mathematics is an international prize founded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The prize is named after János Bolyai and is awarded every five years to mathematicians for monographs with important new r ...
of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2018, she became the first Hungarian to be awarded the
Madame de Staël Prize of the
All European Academies
All European Academies (ALLEA) is the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities. It was founded in 1994, and brings together more than 50 Academies of Sciences and Learned Societies from over 40 member countries of the Council o ...
. The prize recognized her extensive research on gender and contemporary European history including her work on the
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
,
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
, and political extremism. She was awarded an
honorary doctorate
An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or ''ad hon ...
from
Södertörn University
Södertörn University ( sv, Södertörns högskola, abbreviated as SH) is a public university college ( sv, högskola) located in Flemingsberg in Huddinge Municipality, and the larger area called Södertörn, in Stockholm County, Sweden. In ...
in
Stockholm in 2021.
Selected works
Pető has written five monographs, published over 250 articles and chapters of books, and edited thirty one literary volumes. Her works have been published in over seventeen different languages, including Bulgarian, Croatian, English, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, and Serbian. She serves on the editorial board two Hungarian academic journals as well as six international publications, and is an associate editor of the ''
European Journal of Women's Studies
The ''European Journal of Women's Studies'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the field of women's studies. It is published quarterly by SAGE Publications. The journal's editors-in-chief are Kathy Davis (Utrecht Universit ...
''.
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References
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Peto, Andrea
1964 births
Living people
Writers from Budapest
Eötvös Loránd University alumni
Corvinus University of Budapest alumni
Academic staff of Central European University
Women's studies academics
20th-century Hungarian historians
20th-century Hungarian women writers
21st-century Hungarian women writers
21st-century Hungarian historians
Hungarian women historians
Historians of Hungary
Historians of the Holocaust