Dr Rosa Campbell
GENDER.ED Postdoctoral Fellow, October 2023 - July 2024
Home institution: University of Cambridge
I am a global historian of feminism. While histories of feminism usually focus on one national context, my work examines how feminism was influenced by global political events, international organisations, migrations and travels and tactics, ideas and texts which circulated across borders. I dislodge accounts that see white women as the primary feminist change makers and the Global North as the centre of emancipatory political thought. Between 2018-2023 I was a Smuts Scholar at the University of Cambridge where I completed my doctoral dissertation. This the first global history of the Australian women’s liberation movement (1968-1990). My new project considers the global history of the four United Nations Conferences on the Status of Women (1975-1995) and sees these as key to feminism in the late twentieth century. My academic work has been published in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Feminist Review, and is forthcoming and under review elsewhere. I convene a writing group for early career scholars working on the global history of feminism. Please get in touch to join us, you would be welcome. I am passionate about extending ideas beyond the academy and my work on a diverse range of topics has appeared in The White Review, The Independent, Literary Hub and Public Books. I also produce work for galleries, museums and public institutions and am an editor at History Workshop. More at https://www.rosa-campbell.com/.
Project Title: Globalising Sisterhood: Feminisms and the United Nations at the End of the Cold War
This project is a global, intersectional, interdisciplinary history of the four UN Conferences on the Status of Women in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and Beijing (1995). These conferences, and the parallel forums of non-governmental organisations, were a microcosm of global feminist networks, frictions, and priorities. At these conferences, thousands of different women — from Soviet astronauts to Islamic feminists — met to pursue global equality, development, and peace. This project understands conferences as key to feminism across the world in the 20th and 21st century.