John W. Hill Chair of European History, Indiana University, Bloomington

Feature

Why Nationalists Insist on the Gender Binary

The attack on transgender people is part of a bigger plan to reverse gender justice

November 6, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

Since 2012 religious groups of many stripes have started to use the term “gender ideology” as a means to polarize the conversation about gender justice, especially in relation to non-binary individuals. What Catholics like the German sociologist Gabriele Kuby want to see is a return to what is “normal” and ...

Why Nationalists Insist on the Gender Binary

Education

BREAKING: DeVos Appointee Says Foreign Spies Are in the Classroom

Programs that refuse to report on international students at government request may face cuts

October 29, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

On Saturday, October 27th, Diane Auer Jones, Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education at the Department of Education, gave a public address at the conference International Education at the Crossroads, organized in Bloomington by Indiana University. An audience of around 100, many of us migrants and persons of color, and most ...

BREAKING: DeVos Appointee Says Foreign Spies Are in the Classroom

Feature

The Bodies that Matter

Saudi Arabia, Western journalism, and Human Rights

October 18, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

Do you know who Israa al-Ghomgham is? What about Jamal Khashoggi? If last week you didn’t, you probably do now. In the past few days Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi national who wrote for the Washington Post since he fled his home country in 2017, has become a household name because he was ...

Feature

Completing the Rape Three Decades Later

Christine Blasey Ford before the Senate

September 25, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

As I read the news this past weekend, I tried to imagine the flurry of negotiations taking place before this Thursday’s Senate hearing regarding Brett Kavanaugh’s suitability for one of the most important positions in our country: Justice of the Supreme Court. I imagined Chuck Grassley talking with his Iowa ...

Feature

Sexual Assault and the Other

On the Contemporary Politicization of Sexual Violence

August 30, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

Though it has been receiving a lot of attention in the media since the #MeToo movement started, sexual violence remains a poorly understood phenomenon. But the statistics on this crime of national proportions are getting better, because the climate of accountability and protection for victims has actually improved over the ...

Democracy

Democracy and the Uterus

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Bodily Autonomy

July 6, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

I was born out of a policy that forbade women to have control over their bodies until they raised 4 children. Under communist Romania, starting in 1967 and until 1989, many babies were born because women were refused control over their sexuality and abortion was made illegal. Most women wanted ...

Feature

When Sexism Became a Word

1968 and Feminism

March 2, 2018 • by Maria Bucur

A year can only be a snapshot, an image at best partial and at worse distorting of the complex messiness of life. For me, 1968 is indubitably a very important year. I was born in September of that year and have lived my whole life with the lingering question of ...

Feature

Sex in the Time of Communism

The ripple effect of the #metoo campaign

December 7, 2017 • by Maria Bucur

My first sexual experience was on a bus in Bucharest. I was 7, surrounded by a throng of people. Like many other kids who lived in the communist bloc, I had parents who worked full time, which meant that I mostly went to school alone. I also came back from ...

Feature

Remembering Romanian Fascism; Worrying About America

Losing Our Moral Compass between Past and Future

September 3, 2017 • by Maria Bucur

Living under Ceausescu was in some ways like living with Donald Trump as president. There was a lot of nationalist swagger, posturing, and boasting about independence from the Soviets. When Ceausescu refused to send troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 as part of the Warsaw Pact crackdown on student protests, people ...