Transformative Podcast

What does the lens of sex work and sexuality tell us about the history of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe? In this episode, Priska Komaromi (Humboldt University) discusses tourism aimed at Westerners that developed in socialist Hungary from the 1960s onwards, often marketed in a sexualized way. She tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about the interactions between Western tourists and Hungarian women, the perceptions of them in Hungarian society, and the discourses about race, civilisation, and Europeanness that permeated these relations.

Priska Komaromi is a PhD candidate at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research examines the history of gender, sex work and sexuality in Central Eastern Europe during the state socialist period, focusing particularly on Hungary.

How might we capture historical events like war and revolution from street level? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Claire Morelon (University of Manchester) tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about how private courtyards, shop windows, graffiti and darkened public transport might shed light on changes in political regimes. She reflects upon how conflict shaped a place as far away from the front as Prague throughout the First World War, and indeed how such a study might productively collapse strict binaries between the battlefield and home front.

Claire Morelon is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague 1914-1920 (Cambridge, 2024), which won the Lizabeth Cohen Prize for the Best Book on Cities and Political Power, the Lynn Hollen Lees Prize for Best Book in European Urban History and the Czechoslovak Studies Association Book Prize. She recently published, with Mary Elisabeth Cox, an edited volume titled Hunger Redraws the Map: Food, State, and Society in the Era of the First World War (also Cambridge, 2025).

How have the Croats in Argentina preserved their identity, memory, and community? How have they transmitted it across generations to this day? Following the collapse of the fascist Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945), around 10,000 Croats fled to Perón’s Argentina and settled there. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Nikolina Židek (IE University Madrid) discusses the formation of the Croatian diaspora in Argentina after the Second World War, its long history, and transformations. She tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about their self-perception as victims of communist persecution, postwar killings, and displacement, while erasing the wartime fascist state and its atrocities, and the meanings of this foundational myth for new generations today.

Nikolina Židek is a Professor at IE University Madrid and a researcher specializing in diaspora and memory studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Complutense University of Madrid. Her work examines the Croatian post–World War II diaspora in Latin America and Spain, as well as the Spanish exile in Yugoslavia. Her book, The Croatian Diaspora in Argentina: From Martyrs to Memory Guardians, is forthcoming from CEU Press in early 2026.

Why have the histories of work and the histories of welfare been told separately, and what happens when we bring them together? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Alexandra Ghiț (GWZO Leipzig) focuses on domestic servants, social workers, and users of welfare in interwar Bucharest to argue that “histories of welfare provision are histories of work, and histories of work are histories of welfare provision.” She tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) how welfare provision has historically been gendered, how this has changed over time, and how a locally-specific but transnationally-connected form of “austerity welfare work” was developed by unpaid and paid, formal and informal workers alike in Depression-era Bucharest.

Alexandra Ghiț is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig. She is the author of Welfare Work Without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest (De Gruyter Brill, 2025). Ghiț is an editor of the 2024 volume, Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries (Brill, 2024), and the author of numerous articles in Aspasia, The European Review of History, and International Labor and Working Class History.

What does the Non-Aligned Movement look like on a plate? Starting with a series of informal dinners in Rijeka and expanding into various events and workshops, Kevin Kenjar (University of Rijeka) pays homage to the Non-Aligned Movement through exploration and fusion of various culinary traditions coming from its numerous member states. In this episode, he reflects on Naan-Aligned Cooking and, with Jelena Đureinović (RECET), explores the tradition of non-alignment through food and cooking.

Kevin Kenjar is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rijeka as part of the ERC project “REVENANT: Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation,” where his research spans a number of sites, particularly in the post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman borderlands. He earned his PhD in Anthropology at UC Berkeley, specializing in Linguistic and Sociocultural Anthropology. His dissertation, which was 300 year micro history of a single street corner in Sarajevo, is the basis of his forthcoming book, “The Street Corner that Started the 20th Century.”