Visiting Researchers’ Lectures as Part of the DIGitART Project

The Institute of Art History invites you to a series of lectures by Visiting Fellows Dr. Kata Benedek and Tobey Yunjing Pan, as well as Vesna Vuković, an external collaborator on the project Digital Networked, Spatial, and (Con)textual Analysis of 20th-Century Artistic Phenomena and Heritage – DIGitART. The researchers focus on critical perspectives on art, gender, and visual culture in socialist and post-socialist contexts, exploring the possibilities and limitations of writing gendered and sexual histories of socialism beyond dominant theoretical frameworks.

The lectures will take place on Monday, 30 March 2026, at 2:00 PM at the Institute of Art History (Room 235), with a planned duration of 90 minutes, and will be conducted in English.

Vesna Vuković (University of Zadar), in her lecture “Women’s / Feminist Art in Late Socialism”, revisits the debate on the relationship between women’s and feminist art, which was considered settled in the 1990s, advocating a move beyond dominant Western theoretical frameworks and highlighting the double marginalization of women artists in late-socialist Croatia.

Tobey Yunjing Pan (University of Edinburgh), in “Prettiness on Screen and the Global Division of Sexualized Labour at the End of the Twentieth Century”, examines representations of the body through the lens of Marxist feminism and social reproduction theory, comparing cinematic depictions of sexualized bodies in the American hit Pretty Woman (1990) and the Hungarian documentary Pretty Girls (1987).

Kata Benedek (Independent researcher), in “Against Speculation: Empiricism as Method in State-Socialist LGBT Cultural History”, presents new methodological approaches to researching LGBT cultural history under socialism, emphasizing empirical research and archival reconstruction, with Hungary as a case study.

The lectures will be moderated by Dr. Sanja Sekelj (Institute of Art History).

Vesna Vuković (University of Zadar) is an external researcher on the DIGitART project, while Tobey Yunjing Pan (University of Edinburgh) and Kata Benedek (Independent researcher) are Visiting Fellows at the Institute.

The lectures are organized as part of the project DIGITART – Digital Networked, Spatial, and (Con)textual Analysis of 20th-Century Artistic Phenomena and Heritage, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, and implemented at the Institute of Art History in 2023–2027.

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Contact: Sanja Sekelj

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