History Meets Urgency: Julia Burkhardt on Femicide’s Global Roots

Julia Burkhardt opened her lecture on femicide with Diana Russell's definition: "the killing of females because they are female."

She then placed that definition into a broader framework: "The act of killing is just a culmination of a deeper structural problem."

Students, faculty and visitors packed Stony Brook University's Frey Hall on September 23 for Burkhardt's lecture, "Femicide: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Global Historical Phenomenon." It was part of the Pressing Matters lecture series, which spotlights issues of urgent public concern through scholarly, artistic and activist lenses.

Burkhardt, a professor of medieval history at Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich, traced femicide back to the period between 1200 and 1700, highlighting that while the killing of women was not an everyday occurance, it certainly was not rare. The goal of her current research project, she explained, is to map these lethal attacks systematically.

Throughout the lecture, Burkhardt stressed the importance of naming the phenomenon in order to expose it. "To name is to recognize. Only when a clear designation is made can the problem itself become visible," she said. In the same breath, she emphasized the universality; In almost all areas of the world, women have been killed by men because of their gender.

The event took place during HUS 201: The Hispanic World through Visual Cultures, a co-taught course led by Professors Fernando Loffredo, Daniela Ruiz, and David Parra, but was open to the wider campus community. The audience engaged actively. One student asked whether femicide increased during wars, while another wondered if the phenomenon manifested differently across social classes.

Michael Rubenstein, director of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, described the lecture as an opportunity to step back and reconsider familiar institutions through a new lens. The talk, he said, "allowed us to think about violence against women, about the institution of marriage and its early history, and all kinds of things that we don't always get a chance to think about."

Burkhardt, who recently received the Prinzessin-Therese-von-Bayern Award 2025, leads an interdisciplinary research group at LMU's Center for Advanced Studies dedicated to femicide in pre-modern times. Her scholarship, spanning cultural history, gender studies, and medieval politics, underscored that violence against women is not a new crisis, but a recurring historical pattern.

As part of the Pressing Matters series, her lecture reminded the audience that history is not remote. The patterns she traced across centuries, and the act of naming them, make visible the structures that still govern gender-based violence today.

The series will continue into mid-October, carrying on as what Rubenstein says is "one of the great traditions that we are proud to uphold."