Marijke Colle

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Parent Category: Introduction

Category: Staff

Executive Co-Director

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Marijke Colle studied Biology at the Ghent State University, from 1965 until 1970. She was always interested in ecology and the protection of the environment. As a student, she was active in radical left movements, in solidarity with the MAI 68 Revolt and in the campaigns against the Vietnam War. She became a founding member of the RAL/LRT, Belgian Section of the Fourth International in 1970. The seventies were also the start of the women’s movement in Belgium.

Marijke Colle was centrally involved in the struggle for free abortion and contraception on demand and later on, also in the struggles of trade-union women against the crisis. She participated in writing the Resolution on Women’s Liberation for the XIth World Congress of the Fourth International in 1979. In 2008, she became involved in the founding process of the NPA in France and was elected in the national leadership of the NPA in January 2009.

Her work as co-director of the IIRE opens a new prospect in which ecology and feminism will certainly play an important role.

Alex de Jong

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Parent Category: Introduction

Category: Staff

Institute Librarian

 

Alex de Jong works part time as the librarian of the IIRE, working on the daily maintenance of the library and archives as well as the undergoing cataloguing of the library. Alex is also an editor of the Dutch socialist magazine Grenzeloos (www.grenzeloos.org)

Penelope Duggan

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Parent Category: Introduction

Category: Staff

Formerly our Director of Women's Studies, Ms. Duggan is a historian holding degrees from the University of Kent (Britain) and the University of Paris 7, and a longterm radical and feminist activist.  She lectured at the first IIRE session in 1982 on the situation and radicalization of women workers and regularly lectures on women's participation in politics as well as general issues of radical strategy and organisation.

Ms. Duggan takes active responsibility in the overall planning and shaping of the political and educational programmes of the IIRE, particularly in developing specific programmes for women and youth activists.

She is the author of Working Paper no. 14, Helena Molony: Actress, Feminist, Nationalist, Socialist and Trade-Unionist, based on original research on the life of this Irish woman activist, and of no. 33, The Feminist Challenge to Traditional Political Organizing, based on her lectures.  She is also co-editor with Heather Dashner of Notebook for Study and Research no. 22 , Women's Lives in the New Global Economy , bringing together contributions from other occasional lecturers or participants at IIRE courses.

Peter Drucker

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Parent Category: Introduction

Category: Staff

Dr. Peter Drucker, a graduate of Yale (BA magna cum laude in history, 1979) and Columbia (PhD in political science, 1994) Universities, previously served as programme co-ordinator in New York for National Mobilization for Survival (1989-91). He was IIRE Co-Director between 1993 and 2006. He is the author of Max Shachtman and His Left (1994) (available from Prometheus Books).

Drucker's teaching and research at the IIRE includes work on the origins of national and ethnic identities and conflicts, particularly in the Middle East, and the history of radical political thought and movements. He has turned his attention recently to the history of sexuality and the European socialist left. A paper he gave in October 2001 on the sexual attitudes in the mid-1920s of leading Dutch Marxists Henriette Roland Holst and Jacques Engels can now be downloaded from the website of the International Institute for Social History - click here.

Dr. Drucker has been lecturing since his arrival on staff in 1993 about liberation movements of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people in the Third World. In 1994 his research took form as an IIRE Working Paper, in 1996 as an article in the London-based New Left Review. In 1998, 2000 and 2002 he worked to include Third World participants and highlight Third World issues at the IIRE's Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual Strategy Seminars.

He has also edited and introduced a pioneering anthology on Third World gays and the left, called Different Rainbows.

Even before publication the book evoked high praise. Martin Duberman, Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York and the unofficial dean of US lesbian/gay studies, called it "a unique, long-needed, and immensely valuable book" whose "significance cannot be overstated". "The essays ... are brilliantly bound together by the book's editor", he added. Urvashi Vaid of the NGLTF Policy Institute, one of the most prominent figures on the US lesbian/gay left, called it "essential and engagingly written". More recently John D'Emilio has decribed Drucker's introduction as 'one of the best analyses yet written of gay identities and politics on a global scale'.

Drucker's conclusion argues, "Full lesbian/gay equality requires Third World liberation in a broader sense: liberation from poverty and dependency." He suggests that Third World movements are beginning to forge a new model of "liberation without ghettoization", which lesbian/gay movements in developed capitalist countries can also learn from.