Lea Börgerding is a PhD Candidate and Research Assistant (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) in the Emmy Noether Research Group Reaching the People: Communication and Global Orders in the Twentieth Century, funded by the DFG (German Research Council). She joined the Center for Global History at Freie Universität Berlin in October 2018, after working in strategic communications and international development in Berlin and Vietnam for two consecutive years. She holds an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a BA in Politics with International Relations from the University of York. During her undergraduate and graduate studies, she was awarded a scholarship by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

In her doctoral project, Lea Börgerding researches women’s transnationalism and anti-colonial, anti-imperialist networks from socialist Eastern Europe and the global South in the context of decolonization and the Cold War (1960s-1970s). She focuses on the 1975 International Women’s Year, studying different delegations from East Germany, Chile, and Vietnam at the World Congress of Women in East Berlin.  

Reaching the People: How to Write Global Histories of Communication (co-taught with Valeska Huber and Sophie-Jung Kim for the MA Global History, winter semester 2019-2020)

Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Global History (co-taught with Sarah Bellows-Blakely, Lisa Hellman, and Susanne Schmidt for the MA Global History, summer semester 2019). 

Emancipation, Cold War Diplomacy, and Socialist Internationalism at the 1975 World Congress of Women in East Berlin

In her PhD project, Lea Börgerding explores the role of women’s transnationalism for relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South from the 1960s to the 1980s. Her research focuses the 1975 International Women’s Year and the World Congress of Women, which took place in October 1975 in East Berlin. Tracing different delegations and activists at the world congress – from the Vietnam Women’s Union to the All-African Women’s Federation and the Chilean diaspora in East Germany, she explores the intersection between anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, socialist agendas and demands for women’s emancipation during decolonization and the Cold War. She also highlights the political tensions, power relations, and silences that shaped the women’s gathering in East Berlin. Who could reach out to the women of the world? And how was the world congress communicated to the world, and by whom? As such, Lea Börgerding aims at contributing to ongoing scholarly discussions about new histories of internationalism in the 20th century, socialist globalisation between Eastern Europe and the global South as well as connections between gender and global history.

Lea Börgerding, ‘Der Kalte Krieg im Internationalen Jahr der Frau: Westdeutsche Fraueninitiativen und der Weltkongress in Ost-Berlin‘, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 69:2 (2021), pp. 109-124.

Lea Börgerding, 'Rezension zu: Delap, Lucy:  Feminisms. A Global History. Chicago  2020. ISBN 978-0-226-75409-3', H-Soz-Kult, 10.05.2021, www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-94222.

Ana Carolina Schveitzer, Lea Börgerding, Oscar Broughton, 'A global history of internationalism", Esboços, 28:48 (2021), pp. 619-626, https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/esbocos/issue/view/3199.