We are pleased to announce our 2015 Visiting Fellows. This summer we will host three visiting fellows:
Jessica Pearson-Patel is a historian of France, the French empire, international organisations, public health and development. During her residence at Birkbeck, Jessica will work on a book manuscript, The Colonial Politics of Global Public Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa. She will conduct more research on the Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara, a joint Franco-British organisation active in developing public health in the French and British African colonies after the Second World War.
Brigid O’Keeffe is a specialist in late imperial Russian and Soviet history, with interests in internationalism, ethnicity, citizenship and everyday Soviet life. Brigid is the author of New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union (University of Toronto Press, 2013). She is currently working on a new book, Speaking Transnationally: Esperanto, Citizen Diplomacy and Internationalism in Russia, 1887-1939.
Friederike Kind-Kovacs is a historian of childhood, central, eastern and southern Europe, and the author of Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Central European University Press, 2014). During her fellowship she will be conducting research for her second book, The Embattled Child: Child Welfare in Interwar Hungary between International Philanthropy and National Propaganda, 1918-1944, in which she explores the effects of the First World War and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on children in central Europe, with a special focus on Hungary.
The Reluctant Internationalists project is also delighted to host Francesca Piana’s extended stay at Birkbeck from May 2015 to November 2016. Francesca is a postdoctoral fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation, and currently working on two projects: a book manuscript on the history of international initiatives for prisoners of war and refugees after the First World War, and a project entitled Women and Humanitarian Work: Three Parallel Lives, ca.1880s-1950.
You can read more about them on our website under ‘people’.
We look forward to welcoming the fellows to London, and to spending a productive summer of discussions and collaborations with them. Our new round of visiting fellowship applications will open in the autumn.