Sponsored by the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, the Department of Jewish Studies, the Department of History, and the Center for European Studies
Michal Shapira, Department of History, Tel Aviv University;
Affiliated Visiting Scholar, Bildner Center, Spring 2025
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
10:30 AM–Noon; Lunch will be served.
Miller Hall (14 College Ave.), Room 115
RSVP by Wednesday, March 19, to
Scholars have thoroughly researched Sigmund Freud’s writings about male homosexuality, while overlooking his radical views on homosexuality in women. In this seminar, Professor Michal Shapira will examine one of Freud’s least-studied cases: that of Margarethe Csonka, a young Jewish lesbian whose identity was shaped as growing equality, urbanization, and modernization in 1920s Vienna afforded new opportunities to women and Jews. Csonka’s case will be situated within the broader contexts of medical and psychological discourse, Freud’s own writings, Jewish and gender history, and the urban and artistic landscape of modern Vienna.
Shapira is the author of Sigmund Freud and his Patient Margarethe Csonka: A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman in Modern Vienna (Routledge, 2023) and The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
