p The Birth of a Field Women’s and Gender Studies in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe p Introduction Krassimira Daskalova Every volume of Aspasia includes an ‘Aspasia Discussion Forum’ in which a particular topic is highlighted or debated. Aspasia dedicates this year’s (2010) and next year’s (2011) Forums to the field of women’s and gender studies in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). The idea came from a round-table on Gender Studies in CESEE organised by Aspasia editor Maria Bucur for the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) in Philadel- phia in November 2008. The pieces included here by Agnieszka Gra and Mihaela Miroiu were first presented at that round-table. The other participants wrote their contributions especially for Aspasia. The five texts in this Forum are a wonderful be- ginning of our discussions about the establishment and development of women’s and gender studies in CESEE in the last two decades. Next year we will continue with the presentation of the state of the art in this field in other important East European contexts. During the period under consideration, the category of ‘gender’ appeared as an analytical tool in the realm of historical research in CESEE as well. To follow these developments, the 2012 issue of Aspasia will host a Forum dedicated specifically to the appearance and progress of women’s and gender history as a field of study and an academic discipline in the region. 1 Women’s and gender studies have been part of Western higher education for more than thirty years, though their status and degree of implementation remain decid- edly uneven, and in some cases programmes and departments have been abolished, or face an uncertain future. 2 From the 1970s, when such programmes first started in the USA, until the 1990s – the decade in which this field came into existence in some East European countries 3 – there were over six hundred programmes, thousands of specialists and tens of thousands of courses in the United States alone. AƐer 1989, Western (American and European) achievements in these new academic fields have had a stimulating impact on the scholarly situation in many CESEE countries where an interest in women and gender started to aƦract researchers in fields such as history, sociology, political sciences, anthropology and economics. forum aspasia Volume 4, 2010: 155–205 doi:10.3167/asp.2010.040110