Biography
Elisa Heinrich is a historian of gender, sexuality, and disability, specialising in social movements, knowledge practices and memory politics. Before joining the EUI, she was a visiting professor for queer history and biographical studies at the University of Vienna.
Elisa obtained her PhD from the University of Vienna in 2021 with a dissertation on friendship and homosexuality in German women’s movements around 1900. During her doctorate, she was a visiting fellow at the Basel Graduate School of History and at Cornelia Goethe Centre for Gender Studies, Frankfurt am Main. Her thesis, published as a monograph in 2022, received several awards and offers the first history of the women’s movement in pre-1914 Germany from a queer historical perspective. By employing intimacy as an analytical lens, the book not only offers a fresh look at the multifaceted relationships among feminist activists but also helps better understand the functioning of social movements in general.
During her Max Weber Fellowship, Elisa has been working on disability rights activism in Central Europe since the 1970s and on questions of epistemic authority and knowledge production in disability history, while continuing her work on queer movements in Austria and Germany.
In her current research, Elisa uses the domain of sexual health and sexual justice to look at the relationship between social movements and international organisations (IOs). Her new project traces the mechanisms through which women’s, LGBT and disability rights movements have shaped multilateral health governance, and how, in turn, IOs have enabled, constrained, and sometimes co-opted the demands of those movements regarding sexual health and sexual rights.