Lithuania was one of the first European countries to give women political rights, granting them the right to vote and run for elected offices in 1918. But how did this early advance play out through the Soviet regime and Lithuania’s emergence as a new democracy in 1990? Are any female politicians powerful enough to meaningfully influence current political tendencies?

Irmina Matonyte will engage such issues on Thursday, March 3, from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., in a brown bag lunch discussion titled “Focus on Eastern Europe: Women in Political Leadership.” Matonyte, a researcher with the Vilnius Institute for Social Research and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Kaunus University of Technology in Lithuania, is currently a Fulbright Visiting Researcher in the Department of Political Science at UNCG.

Matonyte’s talk is part of “Translating Gender,” a series of discussions sponsored by UNCG’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program and Office of Multicultural Affairs. Events feature UNCG faculty and visiting scholars reflecting on gender issues in international contexts. Three brown-bag lunch discussions will be held at the Multicultural Resource Center on Thursday afternoons in March, followed by a fourth presentation in the new Science Building in April.

Upcoming events in the series are:

• Thursday, March 17, 12:30-1:30 p.m., Multicultural Resource Center: Yanghee Kim, visiting scholar from South Korea in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, will present “Gender Indicators for Monitoring the Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action.”

• Thursday, March 24, 12:30-1:30 p.m., Multicultural Resource Center: Mary Ellis Gibson, professor of English and director of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Jill Green, associate professor of dance, will reflect on their experiences as Fulbright Scholars.

• Thursday, April 7, 4 to 5 p.m., 101 New Science Building: The series will conclude with the WGS annual Linda Arnold Carlisle Research Grant Presentation, given this year by Juana Suárez, assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages. Her talk, “From the Barricades: Critical Essays on Colombian Cinema,” will present the research she conducted last summer with film collections in Colombia.

All events are free and open to the public. For more information about the “Translating Gender” series and other events surrounding Women’s History Month in March, contact Women’s and Gender Studies at 334-5673 or visit http://wgs.uncg.edu.