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.