Blog Archive

Conference Report: Medicine and Public Health in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc 1945-1991

Researchers from all over the world, from Australia through Bulgaria came together in Paris for a two-day workshop titled ‘Medicine and Public Health in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc 1945-1991‘ on January 23-24, 2015.  Convened by Grégory Dufaud (l’EHESS, LabEx TEPSIS, France) and Susan Gross Solomon (University of Toronto, Canada), the workshop’s aim was to explore the intersection between Soviet medicine and public health and that of the Socialist Bloc in Eastern Europe after World War II. The papers focused on knowledge circulation, the transfer and local adaptation of public health practices and scientific interaction. Many participants addressed these issues through a comparative perspective, either between the Soviet Union and individual Eastern European countries, East and West or among the members of the Socialist Bloc.

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Setting up the theme of the workshop, Lion Murard (Cermes3, France) gave an overview of the “Story Before the Story” and demonstrated the significance of Eastern European public health practitioners and experiences in shaping international public health in the Interwar era. Alain Blum (l’EHESS, Cercec, France) followed with an analysis of the methods of Soviet demographers and the accessibility of demographic data for contemporary and historical researchers.

Focusing on the emphasis of PREVENTION in Soviet and Eastern European public health policy, Donald Filtzer (University of East London, UK) revealed a fascinating story of factory medicine in the Soviet Union during and after the war. He highlighted how the Soviet health system attempted to counter lost work time due to starvation and illness, the prominence of skin infections due to lack of access to hygiene and the long term consequences of the home front experience on both the health of workers and the organization of medical practice. Chris Burton (University of Lethbridge, Canada) argued that the particular direction of Soviet medicine may have been a result of practical solution and intended as temporary, as much as it was based on ideology. For instance, the synthesis of preventive and clinical work, promoted from the beginning of the Soviet regime, stemmed from an insufficient number of doctors in the Civil War. In her talk titled ‘Personal hygiene and public health care in the Polish countryside after 1945 – confrontation of propaganda and reality’, Ewelina Szpak (Institute of History, Academy of Sciences, Poland) argued that the end of the 1950s and 60s was a time of crucial social changes and attitudes toward hygiene in Poland. This was especially the case in Polish villages that were seen as a bastion of backwardness, and therefore became the focus of an experimental top-down program of village hygienisation. Tricia Starks (University of Arkansas, US) investigated what addiction means and how that meaning affects the image of the addict. Looking at cigarette addiction and alcoholism, she contended that throughought the 20th century, Russian addiction therapies remained rooted in the mind and the will, not the brain and body. Starks’s presentation was guided by the question that if will is based upon Enlightenment concepts of freedom, how is this will in addiction conceptualized in the USSR.

The second large theme explored in the workshop was PRO-NATALISM AND REPRODUCTIVE POLICIES. Paula Michaels (Monash University, Australia) presented a comparative research project jointly conducted with Ema Hresanova (University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic) on Pain and Paternalism in Soviet and Czechoslovak Maternity Care. The paper explored the circulation and adaptation of psycho-prophylaxis in the respective medical and social contexts and demonstrated a heterogeneous pattern of practices that do not map on to the concept of Sovietization. Muriel Blaive (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic) shifted the temporal focus of the birthing experience to post-communist Czech Republic and placed it in comparison with North American feminist and patient’s rights movements, hospital practices and power structures in maternity care.  Sylwia Kuzma-Markowska (University of Warsaw, Poland) examined contraception and abortion law and practice in postwar Poland as situated between East and West. She showed that Polish legislation followed a Soviet type of abortion culture, and at the same time professional contacts with the West were facilitated by the International Family Planning Organization, which Poland joined as the first Eastern European country in 1959. In the case of Bulgaria, Anelia Kassabova (Sofia University, Bulgaria) pointed out that the legalization of abortion was based on the civil rights of the socialist woman, that is the right to take independent decisions on the matter of motherhood according to her own conscience. The gradual tightening of the law towards prohibition did not reduce the number of total abortions significantly, but raised the proportions of medically justified ones – with the lack of access to contraceptive technologies, abortion remained the main method of family planning.

The second day brought the workshops focus to clinical trials, treatment and international collaboration in public health and medicine. Grégory Dufaud’s paper analyzed the ways in which Soviet psychiatrists reconsidered psychiatry and its therapeutic ambitions in the context of the competition between clinical and experimental models after World War II. In her paper, Galina Orlova (The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration) looked at the discursive practices and shifts of nuclear physicists on the subject of the health risks of radiation.  Pascal Grosse (Charité, Germany) presented a paper on clinical trials conducted in East Germany by Western pharmaceutical companies in the 1970s and 80s. Grosse argued that the trials were part of the GDR’s trade with the West, in this case the expertise of clinical staff and the bodies of patients were the commodity provided by the state in exchange for hard currency. The clinical trials were situated in a complex network of state bureaucracies and became sites of power struggles among their different factions. Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck, University of London, UK) focused on the interactions of local German policymakers and their Soviet counterparts in the Soviet Occupation Zone after World War II. She argued that the public health policies heralded by the Soviet military and public health experts found fertile ground in Germany, since its core ideas were considered to be inherently German by the local experts. Finally, Dora Vargha (Birkbeck, University of London, UK) gave an overview of Sabin vaccination trials conducted in Eastern Europe and investigated how ideas about socialist public health and Cold War politics in general propelled the region to a prominent place in polio prevention and eradication.

In her concluding comments, Susan Gross Solomon called to attention the importance of the prewar legacy in public health and medicine and to examine what was carried forward to the postwar era and by whom, what was resisted or scrubbed, and who debated what was to be kept. She invited the researchers of Soviet and Eastern European health and medicine to investigate the assumptions that influence research through archival research and in order to critically approach the concept of Sovietisation and to see what the dynamics was in acceptance, pseudo-acceptance, adaptation, resistance, etc. of Soviet ideas. Solomon also pointed out that many papers addressed collaboration and interaction between East and West, the existence and intensity of which seemed to depend on the scientific field, the presence of intermediators, the number of players and changed over time, e.g. intensified as the Iron Curtain wore out and became more porous.

Upcoming Talk: Atina Grossmann on Jewish Refugees in Soviet Central Asia, Iran and India

Atina Grossmann will give a talk entitled “Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Rescue in Soviet Central Asia, Iran and India” on January 28, 2015. In this lecture, Professor Grossmann addresses a transnational Holocaust story that has been marginalized in both historiography and commemoration. The majority of the c.250,000 Jews who gathered in Allied Displaced Persons camps following World War II survived because they had been “deported to life” in the Soviet Union. Moreover, Iran became a central site for Jewish relief efforts and thousands of Jewish refugees, “enemy alien” as well as allied Jewish refugees in British India, worked with the Jewish Relief Association in Bombay.

Professor Grossmann seeks to integrate these largely unexamined experiences and lost memories of displacement and trauma into our understanding of the Shoah, and to remap the landscape of persecution, survival, relief and rescue during and after World War II. She also asks how this “Asiatic” experience shaped definitions (and self-definitions) as “survivors” in the immediate postwar context of displacement and up to the present globalization of Holocaust memory.

The talk will be held at the Great Hall, British Medical Association House, Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9JP, from 6:30-8pm. This event is organized by the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck and the Institute for Historical Research. For more information and to register, click here.

USSR Now (1958) – Film Screening

Shortly after Stalin’s death, a British television company, Associated Rediffusion, established the first television exchange between Britain and the USSR (ruffling feathers at the BBC). Partnering with the Moscow Television Studio, during the fall of 1957, the company produced a documentary film, USSR Now. The 1958 film is a tour of the USSR that reaches from the Far North to the Black Sea, and is a look inside a country that had been largely closed for two decades. A 35 mm print from the British Film Institute National Archive will be screened.

The film will be introduced and discussed by Ian Christie, Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck in the Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies and Raisa Sidenova, a PhD Candidate at Yale University, who discovered the film while conducting dissertation research. The discussion will be moderated by Johanna Conterio, Postdoctoral Research Associate at Birkbeck in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology.

This event is being held in conjunction with the workshop, “The Black Sea in the Socialist World,” which is supported by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, the Wellcome Trust, the Society for the Social History of Medicine, and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. The screening is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a wine reception. We hope to see you there!

6 February 2015 at 18:00
Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London

Registration essential – book your place here.

Beyond Camps and Forced Labour Conference

beyond-camps-+-forced-labour-722x270 (1)Jessica Reinisch is on the organizing committee of the Fifth international multidisciplinary conference on current international research on survivors of Nazi persecution, “Beyond Camps and Forced Labour,” which will be held at the Imperial War Museum in London, on 7-9 January, 2015.
The preliminary conference programme is available and registration is now open.

The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines who are engaged in research on all groups of survivors of Nazi persecution, including Jews, Roma and Sinti, Slavonic peoples, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, members of underground movements, the disabled, the so-called ‘racially impure’, and forced labourers.

Nikolaus Wachsmann, Professor of Modern European History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London, will give the keynote lecture, “After Liberation – Legacies of the Nazi Concentration Camps,” at 7pm on Wednesday, 7 January in Macmillan Hall, Senate House, University of London.

Upcoming Talk: Ana Antic on ‘Parenting the Nation’ at Oxford Brookes

 

Do not miss Ana Antic’s talk titled “Parenting the Nation: Child Psychiatry, ‘Therapeutic Violence’ and Political Reeducation in WWII and Cold War Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe”

Oxford Brookes on December 9, 2014 from 4:30pm, JHB 204 Headington Campus

Following the Soviet-Yugoslav split in 1948, the Yugoslav political and military authorities devised an exceptionally violent yet psychoanalytically informed political ‘re-education’ programme for those Communists who ‘failed’ to understand the meaning of the break with the USSR and who might have remained loyal to the Soviet Party. The history of this brutal psychological experiment is at the centre of my lecture: in a series of labour camps and prisons, tens of thousands of Party members and military functionaries underwent torture and violence, but the ‘re-education’ effort also involved participation of psychiatrists, psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. The Yugoslav ‘re-education’ experiment was hardly unique: throughout the 1950s similar camps and projects emerged in other countries of the Eastern bloc (Romania in particular) as well as in places as far away as China and Korea, and my talk aims to place Eastern Europe in this global web of psychological experimentation. In that sense, the focus on ‘re-education’ camps opens up a number of core questions regarding the history of mental health sciences in the context of authoritarianism. Firstly, it highlights the tremendous role of WWII in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and reveals unexpected continuities in conceptualizations of psychological ‘re-education’ across the year of 1945. Secondly, it emphasises the significance of ‘psy’ professions for the political history of communism and anti-communism. Thirdly, these authoritarian applications of psychiatry and psychoanalysis sat uncomfortably with the intense trend of Westernization and liberalization of Yugoslav mental health sciences – child psychiatry and psychoanalysis in particular – after the 1948 split. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis then emerge as the lens through which to study the complicated history of Cold War alliances. After Yugoslavia dropped out of the Soviet sphere of influence, it developed a rich scientific and professional cooperation with Western Europe and the US. But Yugoslav psychoanalysts and progressive psychiatrists were also tightly – and centrally – involved in violent anti-Stalinist processes, purges and ‘re-education’ projects, and in the subsequent East European psychiatric and pedagogical networks. Therefore, it is in the fields of psychoanalysis and psychiatry that unexpected alliances formed and crossed the traditional Cold War faultlines: the history of postwar mental health professions in Yugoslavia opens up a much larger social and political story of liberalization and authoritarianism in socialist Eastern Europe.

CMH, Ana Antic Seminar - Parenting the nation, 9 Dec 2014 copy

Dora Vargha at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, on ‘When Polio became Global,’ October 16, 2014: The Podcast

On October 16, Dora Vargha gave a talk at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as a part of the Centre for History in Public Health and the Vaccine Centre lunchtime seminar series. Her talk, ‘ When polio became global: a pre-history of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative,’ addressed the development of international concepts and practices in polio prevention in the post-war decades, and explores how these developments formed part of the foundation of the current polio eradication campaign.

Listen to it here

The Reluctant Internationalists on film

One year into the The Reluctant Internationalists research project, Jessica Reinisch talks about the overaching questions and sources investigated by the research group, academic collaboration and impact on policy on a new film by The Wellcome Trust.

 

Newsletter

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The first volume of our newsletter has just come out, featuring reports from our visiting scholars, information on our upcoming workshops and call for applications, latest talks and publications and much more! Keep a lookout for a new volume every term.

You can view the full newsletter here: Reluctant Internationalists Newsletter Vol 1

To receive a copy of our newsletter in your email, please sign up to our mailing list at reluctant.internationalists@gmail.com cover

 

CfP: Homecomings

Homecomings: Experiences and narratives of anti-fascist resistance veterans and the construction of post-war Europe

April 24-25, 2015

Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College

In the aftermath of WW2, the narrative of widespread anti-fascist resistance became the true foundational myth of both Eastern and Western Europe, and the memory of the resistance came to constitute the core element in national identities and post-war legitimation of European states. However, the experiences of actual resistance soldiers at the end and in the immediate aftermath of the war were complex and multi-layered, and quite often far from celebratory and victorious. This conference will tell a much-neglected transnational European story of experiences of WW2 resistance, and address the mismatch between resistance soldiers’ expectations and their post-war socio-political realities. While historians of European resistance have primarily addressed the theme in isolated national contexts, this conference will explore the striking commonalities in veterans’ experiences across the divided European continent: why was it that resistance soldiers and veterans in so many different political settings, and both East and West of the Iron Curtain, reported a similar feeling of neglect, misunderstanding and betrayal? How can we explain the similarities in the way in which different European countries dealt with their resisters and veterans, and appropriated the narratives and memories of the resistance? The conference will thus cross the traditional boundaries of European historiography, and draw comparisons between the Soviet Union, East and Central Europe, and Western Europe. By including the Soviet Union in a broader European historical narrative, the conference will explore to what extent veterans’ experiences as well as associations cut across Cold War faultlines. Among other themes, the conference will advance our understanding of the history of soldiers’ trauma – physical and psychological – in the context of post-war social and cultural history and memory. It will examine the issue of veterans’ reactions to states’ attempts at appropriating or sanitizing the memory of the resistance, and veterans’ ability to influence national politics; internationalism of veterans’ organizations; veterans’ conceptualizations of justice, retribution and reconciliation; as well as everyday experiences of resistance soldiers in post-war societies and (both harmonious and fraught) relationships between different veterans’ associations.

Panellists are sought to present papers addressing one or more of the following questions: Why did post-war political and military authorities develop such an uneasy relationship with resistance soldiers’ groups, and why were these celebrated victors and anti-fascists often considered a threat to social order and stability? How did the relationship of veterans’ groups to the state evolve over time, and how was it affected by major political and social events of the Cold War? What were the relationships between different veterans’ groups and associations? What was the social, cultural and political position of veterans in post-war Eastern and Western Europe, and did they hold any significant national or international leverage? To what extent was the memory of WW2 shaped by the veterans’ memory/input? What were the early narratives of the resistance, generated from below, and how did they relate to the subsequent construction of memories of WW2? How did resistance soldiers imagine their role in post-war societies? Finally, how did WW2 resistance soldiers engage with the ideological struggles of the incipient Cold War, and how did the Cold War affect the veterans’ status?

Please send resumes, paper titles and abstracts (up to 400 words) to a.antic@bbk.ac.uk by December 7, 2014.

 

Contact information:

Dr Ana Antic, conference convener

Post-doctoral Researcher

Department of History, Classics and Archaeology

Birkbeck, University of London

26-28 Russell Square

a.antic@bbk.ac.uk

On Socialist Globalization – Guest Post By Elidor Mehilli

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Industrial equipment arrives in Albania from the Soviet Union, 1951.

On Socialist Globalization
By Elidor Mehilli

The “Reluctant Internationalists” project is about the history of international collaboration—experts, policy-makers, doctors, planners, and diplomats—and the intended and unintended consequences of these exchanges in the twentieth century. Reflecting this theme, the project itself is international in conception: fellows come from across the Atlantic, as do occasional visiting scholars. This is a major strength.

One other important contribution of the project, to my mind, is the emphasis on Europe’s place in the story of internationalism. Histories of internationalist movements and the global Cold War have often intentionally looked beyond the European continent to highlight the role of non-European actors. Such efforts can be valuable. But they ignore the fact that there have been historically neglected and abused peripheries within Europe. This is a good opportunity to assess these internal divisions within a supposedly integrating continent and “periphery-periphery” relations in the world more broadly.

A highlight of the project, this past summer, was the conference “Agents of Internationalism,” which brought together scholars working on population transfers, relief workers, child-welfare programs, and transnational approaches to disease—among other topics.

During my residency in London (June—July 2014), I worked on a book on socialist globalization—the state-directed but also informal circulation of practices and planners—through the angle of Albania under Yugoslav, Soviet, Eastern bloc, and Chinese patronage. After the Second World War, tiny Albania came to embody the ethos of socialist internationalism, as Soviet advisers, East German engineers, and Czechoslovak technicians descended on the country to lift it up from poverty and deliver on the promise of a workers’ state (which governed an overwhelmingly rural populace). But by the early 1960s socialist internationalism seemed broken. China and the Soviet Union quarreled, Albania and North Korea sought to go their own way, and Third World countries desperately tried to negotiate space for themselves. My book, then, is a study of local and global socialist commonalities that take shape despite political allegiances.

During my residency, I was fortunate to present a chapter of my manuscript to the project participants and receive a good deal of valuable feedback. Informal chats were as productive. London, needless to say, offers fantastic resources. My only disappointment was the fact that England, my lifelong favorite national soccer team, was kicked out early from the World Cup in Brazil. To share the pain in the pub was, at least, of some consolation.

Elidor Mehilli was the 2014 Visiting Research Fellow of the Reluctant Internationalists project. Applications are currently being accepted for the 2015 Visiting Research Fellowship. Please see the Call for Applications.

Elidor Mehilli – Albania, experts and socialist internationalism

In June 2014 we welcomed Elidor Mehilli to Birkbeck as the Reluctant Internationalists’ first Visiting Research Fellow. Elidor’s work focuses on Albania and its place in the socialist world of the 1950s and 1960s. In the video below you can see Elidor discussing his work with Jessica Reinisch, including his interest in socialist internationalism, the changing relationship between Albania and Mao’s China, and the role of experts in the Cold War world.

If you’re interested in applying for our 2015 Visiting Fellow position, please see the call for applications in the post below.

Visiting Research Fellowship – Call for Applications

The Reluctant Internationalists project is now accepting applications for its 2015 summer research fellowship.

The Reluctant Internationalists is a four year Wellcome Trust-funded project, run by Dr Jessica Reinisch at Birkbeck College, University of London, with a team of four full-time researchers. Each summer term we invite a Visiting Research Fellow to join the project team.

Fellowships are open to academic researchers working on any aspect of the history of internationalism or international organisations in the twentieth century. The Fellow will be entitled to £1,300 per month for a maximum of three months. The Fellow will be expected to collaborate with the Reluctant Internationalists team by taking part in our reading group and project meetings, and by helping us to organise a seminar, lecture or other public or outreach event. The Fellow will be a member of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology for the duration of their stay, and will have access to Birkbeck’s and the University of London’s facilities, including use of a shared office for visiting fellows in Birkbeck’s Russell Square site. Successful applicants can take up their posts any time between April and July 2015.

Applications consisting of a CV, a one page research overview, a suggested event and the preferred period of residence, should be sent to reluctant.internationalists@gmail.com by 1 December 2014.

For further details about the project and previous visiting fellows, please see http://www.bbk.ac.uk/reluctantinternationalists, or contact reluctant.internationalists@gmail.com

CfP: Landscapes of Health: The Black Sea in the Socialist World

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The Black Sea in the Socialist World

Birkbeck College, University of London
February 6-7, 2015

Supported by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, The Wellcome Trust, The Society for the Social History of Medicine, and The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

Call for Papers

In May 1962, shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet premiere Nikita Khrushchev toured Bulgaria. Under banners declaring “Forward, to Communism!” at a mass meeting in Varna, a Bulgarian health resort, Khrushchev lauded the Bulgarian people for the way in which they had developed the Black Sea coastline. Model health resorts like Varna, which drew visitors from all over the world, were the pride of the Bulgarian people, he claimed. These resorts demonstrated the commitment of the socialist states to the health and welfare of the people. He contrasted the health resorts on the socialist side of the Black Sea to the NATO missile build-up across the sea in Turkey. The health resorts of the Black Sea demonstrated the peace-loving nature of the socialist states to the world. “The Black Sea should be a sea of peace and the friendship of the peoples,” he argued.

While interest in the place of the Black Sea in the history of tourism, public health and architecture has grown rapidly in recent years, leading to ground-breaking studies, these works have treated each topic and national context in isolation. Works on Cold War diplomacy, too, have not taken into full consideration the position of the Black Sea as a site of cultural and political diplomacy in the socialist world. This workshop seeks to bring together historians studying the Black Sea or whose work involves the Black Sea from a variety of perspectives and both historians of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. The objective of the workshop is to develop the idea of the Black Sea littoral as an international meeting place of the socialist world.

As Khrushchev’s words suggested, the idea of the socialist Black Sea was closely linked to ideas of health and welfare during times of peace. The Black Sea littoral became a favoured health retreat of the political elite and soon became a setting for high politics and diplomatic negotiations. With the Yalta conference (February 4-11, 1945), the place of the Black Sea as a site of East-West diplomacy was formalized. But the Black Sea also became a place of less formal international exchange. From international children’s camps to delegation visits, at the Black Sea people from the socialist world introduced visitors from all over the world to the socialist way of life, in a Cold War contest fought over standards of living.

Participants are sought to present papers which may but will not necessarily fall into the following themes: The divided sea in the Cold War; the political context of Soviet-Turkish, East-West and socialist relations; ideas of Europe; international law; mobility, migration and tourism; commodities; socialist design and urban planning; environmental health; international congresses and festivals, and environmental history. Papers relating to all countries of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR, and which emphasize transnational and international components, are welcome.

Informal enquiries are welcome. Please send paper titles and abstracts (around 300 words) by November 15, 2014 to j.conterio@bbk.ac.uk. Workshop papers will be pre-circulated and are due January 15, 2015.

Contact Details
Dr Johanna Conterio, conference convener
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Birkbeck College, University of London
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology
26-28 Russell Square
London, United Kingdom, WC1B 5DQ
j.conterio@bbk.ac.uk

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Dora Vargha’s upcoming talk at LSHTM

On October 16, Dora Vargha will give a talk at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as a part of the Centre for History in Public Health and the Vaccine Centre lunchtime seminar series. Dora’s presentation, titled ‘ When polio became global: a pre-history of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’, addresses the development of international concepts and practices in polio prevention in the post-war decades and explores the ways in which the scientific practices, intertwined with Cold War politics of the 1950s and 1960s, were formative to the current polio eradication campaign (the full abstract is available here). This paper forms a part of Dora’s new research project undertaken under the auspices of ‘Reluctant Internationalists’, and will be a great opportunity for anyone interested to engage with this exciting topical theme. The talk will take place at LG9, LSHTM, Keppel Street Building, at 12:45-2pm. Admission is free and open to all. For more information, please visit the LSHTM seminar website.

 Dora Vargha seminar flyer with pic copy

Welcome back to a new academic year!

While we were away from our blog, the researchers of the Reluctant Internationalists were busy this summer. A number of us saw publications come out, which may be of interest to some of our readers.

Dora Vargha published an article in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, “Between East and West: Polio Vaccination across the Iron Curtain in Cold War Hungary” (v. 88, no. 2, Summer 2014), which is part of her larger book project, Iron Curtain/Iron Lungs: Governing Polio in the Cold War.

Jessica Reinisch edited, with Matthew Frank, a special issue of Contemporary European History, “Refugees and the Nation-State in Europe, 1919–59,” (v. 49, no. 3, July 2014), which examines how refugees and refugee crises were defined and managed by European nation-states in the forty years after the First World War. Read their introduction for a sketch of the historical context of the refugee problem in Europe and an analysis of the common themes of the papers.

The special issue continues conversations started at a conference Jessica Reinisch and Matthew Frank convened at Birkbeck in 2010, “The Forty Years’ Crisis: Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959.”

Ana Antic published two articles: “Heroes and Hysterics: ‘Partisan Hysteria’ and Communist State-building in Yugoslavia after 1945,” in Social History of Medicine (v. 27, no. 3, August 2014), and, earlier this year, “Therapeutic Fascism: ‘Re-educating’ Communists in Serbia, 1942-1944,” in History of Psychiatry (v. 25, no. 1, March 2014). Both articles are part of her larger research project on the development of psychiatry and psychiatric culture under the conditions of Nazi occupation in Eastern Europe and in its immediate aftermath.

In other publishing news, Dora Vargha was awarded the 2014 Young Scholar Book Award by the International Committee for the History of Technology for her dissertation, Iron Curtain, Iron Lungs: Governing Polio in Cold War Hungary, completed at Rutgers University in 2013.

Also over the summer, we hosted our first major workshop, “Agents of Internationalism”. Thank you to all the participants who made that workshop a great success. Please keep your eye out for further posts about the workshop and about our work together with our first visiting fellow, Elidor Mehilli, Assistant Professor at Hunter College in New York.

This will be a very eventful year for our research group, so please keep your eye out for more details about upcoming talks, events and publications, and for calls for papers. In the meantime, welcome back, and we wish everyone a good start to the new term.