The AABS Board is pleased to announce that Routledge has been awarded the AABS Book Publication Subvention for publishing Marija Gimbutas: Transnational Biography, Feminist Reception, and the Controversy of Goddess Archaeology. The book, authored by Rasa Navickaitė, is a biography and reception history of the Lithuanian–American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994). It presents the first transnational account of Gimbutas’ life based on historical research, and an original examination of the impact of her ideas in various feminist contexts, both academic and popular.
©Rasa Navickaitė, 2023
Rasa Navickaitė is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellow at the Research Platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe” at the University of Vienna. She received her PhD in Comparative Gender Studies from the Central European University, Budapest, where she also stayed as a faculty member and taught courses on the history of socialism, gender and spirituality, and women’s and gender history.
Her current project MOSELIT investigates how LGBTQ sexuality was conceptualized as “deviance” in medical, criminological, educational and other discourses and practices in Lithuanian SSR, seeing it as a part of the broader process of socialist modernization: https://transformations.univie.ac.at/en/members/rasa-navickaite/
This book is a biography and reception history of the Lithuanian–American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994). It presents the first transnational account of Gimbutas’ life based on historical research, and an original examination of the impact of her ideas in various feminist contexts, both academic and popular.
At the core of this book is a success story of an Eastern European woman who survived both Soviet and Nazi occupations of her homeland, lived as a displaced person in postwar Germany, and built her career and scholarly authority within the androcentric American academia. At the same time, it is also a story of a controversy, which followed Gimbutas’ theory of Old Europe – a prehistoric civilization, characterized by peacefulness, egalitarianism, women’s leadership, and the worship of the Great Goddess. First introduced in 1974, this theory inspired women’s movements worldwide, but was harshly criticized by other archaeologists. This book examines the various intellectual contexts (feminist, nationalist, theoretical) in which Gimbutas’ ideas were formed, received, and interpreted, as well as appropriated for different political goals.
This timely study will appeal to scholars and students in the following fields: history of archaeology, prehistoric archaeology, gender studies, feminist studies, women’s history, Baltic studies, and religion and spirituality.
– Rasa Navickaitė
– Rasa Navickaitė
What is the AABS Book Publication Subvention?
The AABS awards its Book Publication Subvention of up to $5,000 for individually authored books, edited volumes, and multiple-authored books in English that make a substantial scholarly contribution to Baltic Studies. The applications must be submitted by publishers, not authors. Priority will be given to single author’s first monographs.
AABS awards two Book Publication Subventions each year. Applications may be submitted for review anytime, on a rolling basis.
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