Anita Kurimay

Penn Humanities Forum Regional Fellow

20152016 Forum on Sex

Anita Kurimay

Assistant Professor of History
Bryn Mawr College

Anita Kurimay is an assistant professor of history at Bryn Mawr College.  She specializes in modern European history with an emphasis on East-Central Europe.  Her main research interests include the history of sexuality, women’s and gender history, conservativism and the politics of the far right, and the history of sport.  She is working on her book manuscript, Sex in the “Pearl of the Danube”: The History of Queer Life, Love, and its Regulation in Budapest, 1873-1961, that explores the relationship between the evolution of the modern East-Central European state and sexuality.

Queer Budapest

Situated at the intersection of sex, popular culture, the human sciences, and law, my project Queer Budapest, focuses on the historical lives, loves, understandings, and regulation of sexuality in Hungary from the late 19th century to the 1960s. It aims to reintegrate East-Central Europe into a pan-European discourse on sex. Using same-sex sexuality as a lens Queer Budapest pushes the boundaries of current scholarship, which has tended to privilege Western metropolises as central sites and disseminators of sexual knowledge. Via narratives about same-sex sexuality from sources as diverse as the writings of Kraft-Ebbing, Freud, detective novels, police journals, newspapers, and court records, my project illustrates the complex ways in which language, changing conceptualizations, and the experience of sex cut across both real and imagined boundaries between Eastern and Western European capitals.