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As part of the Interrogating Development Series, the Department of International Development is hosting a seminar on 'She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World', a book by Marral Shamshiri and Sorcha Thomson. Saskia Zielińska, PhD student at King's, will be the discussant at this event.
About the book
Rosa Luxemburg, Claudia Jones, and Leila Khaled may have joined Lenin, Mao, and Che in the pantheon of twentieth-century revolutionaries, but the histories in which they figure remain unjustly dominated by men. She Who Struggles sets the record straight, revealing how women have contributed to revolutionary movements across the world in endless ways: as leaders, rebels, trailblazers, guerrillas, and writers; revolutionaries who also navigated their gendered roles as women, mothers, wives, and daughters.
Through exclusive interviews and original historical research, including primary sources never before translated into English, readers are introduced to largely unknown revolutionary women from across the globe. The collection ultimately presents a hidden history of revolutionary internationalism that will be a must-read for activists engaging in feminist, anti-colonial, and antiracist struggle today.
About the speakers
Marral Shamshiri
Marral Shamshiri is a PhD candidate in international history at LSE. Her project looks at the history of the Iranian Left, focusing on the transnational and political connections between Iranian and Arab revolutionary movements in the 1960s and 1970s. She is co-editor of the book She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World (Pluto, 2023). Her recent writing and research has been published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), History Workshop magazine, Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, Revolutionary Papers, Silver Press blog, and The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East (Oneworld, 2024).
Sorcha Thomson
Sorcha Thomson is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and an Editorial Fellow at History Workshop. Her PhD thesis explores the history of international solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement in the mid-twentieth century. It has been conducted as part of the Entangled Histories of Palestine and the Global New Left research project at Roskilde University. She is co-editor of the books Palestine in the World (Bloomsbury, 2023) and She Who Struggles (Pluto Press, 2023) and has contributed to several journals, books and magazines, including the Journal of Palestine Studies and The Global South.
Saskia Zielińska
Saskia is a PhD researcher at the Department of International Development at King's where she has written her thesis on adolescent pregnancy and multi-sided violence in Peru. She is one of the founding members of the Editorial Collective for the online publication Feminist Perspectives and also part of the SSPP Decolonising the Curriculum Workstream. She recently started a research position at the University of Sheffield where she is investigating adolescent pregnancy in Cuba, Colombia and Mexico.
Event details
Nash Lecture Theatre (K2.31)King's Building
Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS