ACADEMICS
AND THEIR BOOKS
Andrea Pető
State Award
The first object I have chosen is this framed official announcement on my wall. It is important for me for three reasons. First, in a Hungarian context there are very few women who are actually getting distinguished state awards. If women are honored by state awards they are usually artists who are entertaining men. There are very few female scientists who are getting state awards. I am very happy and proud to be one of the female scientists who got Officers Cross of Merit from the President of the Hungarian Republic for my contribution to institutionalizing gender studies in Hungary. I consider it as an honor and it is something I am very proud of. Second reason is to encourage young women who are visiting my office. They usually look around and they say: “wow, at certain point of my career I also want to have an office like this”. And my response is always that yes, you just have to work three times more than anybody else for 27 years and then you can have an office like this! And maybe you will also get a state award. It gives a sign: you can do it! And the third significance of this award is given by the present political attacks on gender studies in Hungary and all over the world. This Officers Cross of Merit was awarded by the President of Hungary and I think it is an important acknowledgement that gender studies and the work we, gender studies community and scholars are doing, really matters!
Teddy Bears
I have been teaching at CEU for 27 years and I was also teaching for some time at the University of Miskolc, which is in Northern Eastern Part of Hungary, because I also find it important that academics at CEU should contribute to the Hungarian academic and intellectual life. When the University of Miskolc started branding itself, they have chosen this bear as their mascot and I immediately sent an email to my friend: I want that bear immediately in my office! That’s how actually this big bear ended up in my office because it reminded me of my time at the Department of Political Science and when I was running the Center for Equal Opportunities and Gender Studies there . I think this was a very formative period of my life and I want to see this reminder every day. There is also a small bear there which is close to the big bear. This is actually a present from a parent of one of my former students. He was one of the most interesting and brightest students. He was accepted with full PhD scholarship in Canada and then he suddenly died there just when he started the graduate program. His mother called me saying: I don’t know what to do and how to handle the Canadian university administration. So, I assisted the family as much as I could and helped them with all sorts of administrative matters. Some weeks later the mother showed up in my office bringing flowers thanking for my help and this small red bear was attached to the bouquet. It was a difficult moment in my academic life. Of course, flowers are gone by now but I have this small bear as a reminder of the very talented student who died suddenly. I wanted to say that we, as a faculty, have to be extremely responsible and careful when we are dealing with students because we do not really know if that will be the last occasion when we see them. This sounds like a wisdom from a Coelho text, but it is actually true.
Dissertation
This book that I selected for this project does not really look like a real book because it has this serious, official looking black cover. You have to know that in a Hungarian context if you want to be a full professor, you have to write four monographs which means four doctoral degrees on four different topics. You have to have a Doctor Universitatis, you have to have PhD, you have to have habilitation and you have to have the Doctorate of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It is extremely competitive process which requires basically an uninterrupted academic career. If you are a woman then it is extremely difficult especially if you want to have children. This book is my fourth dissertation and actually my fifth monograph, about women in the Arrow Cross Party, the Hungarian Nazi Party, the female perpetrators during the Second World War. It is a heavy book, I don’t know if it is obvious from the picture, but it has more than four hundred pages and it is really three kilograms! I am very proud of this because only 14 % of Hungarian Academy of Sciences are women so leaky pipeline works in a sense that very few women are actually awarded with this title.
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Andrea Pető is a Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at the Central European University.
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We talked about four objects in her office: an award, her dissertation, and her two teddy bears.
I placed this book at a very visible place in my office demonstrating that I did it! It took more than 6 years of research and writing. The evaluation process itself lasted more than twenty six months and involved eight committees, who were reviewing my habitus, my publications and this book. It is a pretty competitive and very well-regulated process. Because it is so well regulated that’s why I had a chance. There is no informal influence of the old boys’ network, but sheer quantification of science. Of course you can be critical of that but formal regulation always protects women academics. I will never forget the day when I was bringing seven copies of this dissertation to the Nador 7, which is right at the corner where the offices of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences are. You know these big blue IKEA bag and they were full of these black books. They were so heavy that I could not lift them so I was basically dragging this IKEA bag with all these books to the Nador 7 over Zrinyi. Everybody was watching me, looking at me wondering: what this woman is carrying in this IKEA bag? And it was only my dissertation but it was so heavy, that I could not lift the IKEA bag. I remember, it was a sunny day and I was dragging the bag on the street and I thought, this is the moment when I accomplished something, I submitted the thesis and I hoped the committee reading it would be happy with it.
Interview by Ana Lolua
Photography by Damian Aleksiev
November 29, 2017
