Univ.-Prof. Dorit Geva, PhD

Portrait photo of Dorit Geva.

Photo source: Irene Graf Fotografie.

Professor for Politics and Gender

Contact

Neues Institutsgebäude
Universitätsstr. 7/2nd floor
Room: B 212
1010 Vienna, Austria
T: +43-1-4277-494 15
E-Mail: dorit.geva@univie.ac.at
Study assistant: Sophia Krauss

Office Hour

By appointment only

Teaching

Courses: u:find

Brief biography

Prof. Dr. Geva is a Canadian who completed her B.A. at Tel Aviv University, and then an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology at New York University (Ph.D. supervisor: Craig Calhoun), after which she was the Vincent Wright Fellow in Comparative Politics at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute (2006-2007), followed by four years as a Harper Schmidt Fellow (the Society of Fellows) teaching undergraduate political and social theory within the University of Chicago's common core curriculum (2007-2011). She joined Central European University in Autumn 2011 as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted within CEU to Associate Professor (2014-2021) and then Full Professor (2021-2023). While at CEU she was Head of Department 2017-2019 (Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology), and then the Founding Dean of Undergraduate Studies (2019-2022). Professor Geva’s work lies at the intersection of gender and politics, political sociology, comparative and qualitative methods, historical sociology, and political and social theory. Her methodological expertise is of a wide range, including archival research, political ethnography, interviews, and comparative methods.

Prof. Dr. Geva wrote a comparative book on the politics of military service in France and the United States, published by Cambridge University Press and since published in German by Hamburger Press. She published related journal articles in the American Journal of Sociology, Polity, Politics and Society, and various other journals. Weaving together Weberian approaches to modern state development, scholarship on American Political Development (APD) and feminist theories of patriarchal power, this corpus expands feminist theorizing on modern state power, its complex relationship to men's patriarchal power, and specifies how these forces affected establishment of military conscription systems for men. She has also published on U.S. policies on fatherhood-promotion and neoliberal welfare reform in the journal Social Politics.

In 2013 she started studying gender politics and the new radical right in Europe, with the support of a Marie Curie Grant, and a European Institute for Advanced Studies (EURIAS) grant held at the Collegium de Lyon, a French Institute for Advanced Studies. Assessing already in 2013 that European politics were moving rightwards, and under a new wave of female leaderhsip, Professor Geva's scholarship has become a central point of reference in current analyses of gender politics and the populist radical right. Her work has been published in the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, and Social Politics, where her article, "Daughter, Mother, Captain: Marine Le Pen, Gender, and Populism in the French National Front," was selected as an Editor's Choice article. Her article "Non au Gender! Moral epistemics and French conservative strategies of distinction" received an honourable mention for the 2021 Best Paper Award by the European Sociological Association.

Her most recent work examines the merger and mutual remaking of far-right and neoliberal politics, especially as articulated in contemporary Europe and the formation of what she views as a post- (not ex-) neoliberal state.

Research interests

• Politics and Gender
• Political Sociology
• State Theory
• Historical Sociology
• Rightwing Politics
• Neoliberalism

Selected Publications

Books

  • 2013 Conscription, Family, and the Modern State: A Comparative Study of France and the United States. Cambridge University Press.
  • 2022 Militär und Familie: Eine andere Geschichte moderner Staatlichkeit. Hamburger Edition.

Articles

  • 2023 “Eine Starke Frau. Marine Le Pen und die Transformation der französischen Rechten.“ Mittelweg 36.

    English version:
    2023 “A ‘Strong Woman’: Marine Le Pen as Change-Maker.” Eurozine.
  • 2022 “Populist strategy in the European parliament: How the anti-gender movement sabotaged deliberation about sexual health and reproductive rights.” Co-authored with Felipe G. Santos European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2022.2113417
  • 2021 “Europe's Far-Right Educational Projects and Their Vision for the International Order.” International Affairs, 97, 5: 1395–1414. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab112. Co-authored with Felipe G. Santos.
  • 2021 “Orbán's Ordonationalism as Post-Neoliberal Hegemony.” Theory, Culture, and Society, April 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276421999435
  • 2020 “A Double-Headed Hydra: Marine Le Pen’s Charisma, Between Virility and Caritas."
    NORMA: Nordic Journal for Masculinity Studies Vol 15, 1: 26-42. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/18902138.2019.1701787
  • 2020 “Daughter, Mother, Captain: Gender, Populism, and the French National Front.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society. Vol. 27, 1: 1-26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxy039.
  • 2019 “Non Au Gender: Anti-Gender Mobilization and French Conservative Bourgeois Strategies of Distinction.” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology. Vol. 6, 4: 393-420. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2019.1660196
  • 2019 “Non-State Community Virtual Currencies.” In Private Law Implications of Virtual Currencies, Edited by David Fox and Sarah Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Co-authored with Benjamin Geva.
  • 2017 “Globalizing Gender.” In Social Theory Now, edited by Monika Krause, Claudio Benzecry, and Isaac Ariail Reed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • 2015 “Selective Service, the Gender-Ordered Family, and the Rational Informality of the American State.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 121, 1 (July), pp. 171-204.
  • 2015 “Dependency as a Keyword of the American Draft System and Persistence of Male-Only Registration.” Polity, Vol. 47, pp. 199-224.
  • 2014 “Of Bellicists and Feminists: French Conscription, Total War, and the Gender Contradictions of the State.” Politics and Society, Vol. 42, 2, pp. 135-165.
  • 2011 “Not Just Maternalism: Marriage and Fatherhood in American Welfare Politics.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society, Vol. 18, 1, pp. 24-51.
  • 2011 “Where the State Feared to Tread: Conscription and Local Patriarchalism in Modern France.” In The Power of Kinship: Patrimonial States in Global Perspective, edited by Julia Adams and Mounira Charrad. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 636, 1, pp. 111-128.
  • 2011 “Different and Unequal?: Breadwinning, Dependency Deferments, and the Gendered Origins of the United States Selective Service System.” Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 37, pp. 598-618.
  • 2009 "Capifamiglia o coscritti? Origini di genere della coscrizione militare negli Stati Uniti durante la prima guerra mondiale." ("Fathers or Soldiers?: The Gendered Origins of Conscription in First World War United States.") Contemporanea: rivista de storia dell'800 e del '900, 2009, January, pp. 29-52.

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