Eszter Varsa is a social historian with a PhD in Comparative Gender Studies (CEU, Budapest), currently working as a postdoc in the ERC Advanced Grant project “ZARAH: Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, From the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century” at the CEU in Vienna. She studies women’s labour activism in the agrarian-socialist movements in Hungary and internationally between the late 19th century and the 1930s, discovering the hitherto completely unexplored role of (landless) peasant women in the women’s and labour movements, and the solidarity of (but also conflicts between) women across class and ethnic divides. She was Marie Sklodowska-Curie Intra-European (IEF) Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg (2014–2016) and a Romani Rose Fellow at the Research Centre on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University (2020).

Eszter puts center stage the connection between gender analysis and the analysis of material inequality, and the study of the position of the Roma population. Aside from writing articles, she coedited a special issue (2021) on reproductive politics and sex education in Cold War Europe. Based on hundreds of children’s case files, and interviews with institution leaders, teachers, and people formerly in state care, her 2021 book Protected Children, Regulated Mothers: Gender and the ‘Gypsy Question’ in State Care in Postwar Hungary, 1949–1956 examines child protection in Stalinist Hungary as a part of 20th-century European history. Rather than being merely a tool of political repression and a further attempt to establish totalitarian control, state care in postwar Hungary was often shaped by the efforts of policy actors and educators to address the myriad problems engendered by the social and economic transformations that emerged after World War II. Thus child protection also focused on parents, particularly single mothers, regulating not only their entrance to paid work but also their sexuality. She found that child protection had a centuries-long common history with the ‘solution to the Gypsy question.’