Rate My Professor Celia Donert

Professor Celia Donert is Professor of Contemporary European History in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Wolfson College. She also serves as Faculty Alumni & Development Officer. Donert received her PhD in History from the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy, in 2008, having studied previously at the University of Oxford and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. Before arriving at Cambridge in 2019, she taught for seven years at the University of Liverpool, where she was promoted to Professor in 2018. Earlier in her career, she held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and postdoctoral fellowships at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. She was Visiting Professor in the History of Human Rights and Democracy at the University of Vienna in spring 2018 and Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies on Universalism and Particularism in European Contemporary History at LMU Munich in 2024.

Donert's research focuses on contemporary European history, particularly Central Europe, exploring communism and state socialism, nationalism and internationalism, human rights, and gender, with emphasis on Romani activism, citizenship rights under socialism, and women's rights in international communism. Her monograph The Rights of the Roma: The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge University Press, 2017) received the Czechoslovak Studies Association Book Prize in 2019 and was a finalist for the Wiener Library Ernst Fraenkel Prize in 2018; a Czech translation appeared in 2024. Key edited volumes include The Legacies of the Romani Genocide in Europe since 1945 (Routledge, 2022, with Eve Rosenhaft), Making Sense of Dictatorship: Domination and Everyday Life in East Central Europe since 1945 (Central European University Press, 2022, with Ana Kladnik and Martin Sabrow), and Women's Rights and Global Socialism (International Review of Social History, 2022). She has held AHRC Leadership Fellowships for projects such as How Women’s Rights became Human Rights: Gender, Socialism, and Postsocialism in Global History, 1917-2017, and received grants from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and British Academy. Donert serves on the editorial boards of Past & Present, Journal of Contemporary History, Social History, and Historický časopis; was co-editor of Contemporary European History (2018-2023); and co-edits the Cambridge University Press series European Histories of the Present. She convenes the Rethinking Modern Europe seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, and presented a BBC World Service documentary on The Romani Holocaust: An Unfinished History.