1-2 July 2015 | Birkbeck College, University of London

Organizers:     DFG-Network: Social Welfare and Health Care in EE and SEE during the Long 20th Century, Regensburg University, Germany & The Reluctant Internationalists, Birkbeck College London

Birkbeck College, University of London, July 1st-2nd 2015

Wednesday, 1 July

4-4.15    Welcome Note & Introduction of Speaker

4.15-6 p.m.     Public Keynote Lecture and Discussion: Prof. Paul Lerner (University of Southern California, USC): War Trauma and the Historiography of Psychiatry.

Thursday, 2 July

9.00-11.00 a.m.     Roundtable I: Disease and Illness

  • Indira Duraković (University of Teacher Education Styria/University of Graz): Marginalisation and Public Health in 19th century Serbia.
  • Johanna Conterio (Birkbeck College, London): Was there a distinctly socialist approach to natural healing? Examining the transnational roots of Soviet health resort medicine in the 1920s.
  • Heike Karge (Regensburg University): Socialist Psychiatry? War trauma in post-World War Two Yugoslavia
  • Dora Vargha (Birkbeck College, London): Live Polio Vaccine Development: A Project of Socialism?  
  • Esther Wahlen (EUI Florence): Alcoholism and the complexities of inner life in late socialism

11.30-1 p.m.         Roundtable II: Family and Childhood

  • Fanny Le Bonhomme (Potsdam/Rennes University): Politics and family conflicts in the GDR (1960-1968). Psychiatric records as a source for social history
  • Ana Antic (Birkbeck College, London): Getting rid of ‘little Stalins’: The politics of children’s mental health in Cold War Yugoslavia and Europe
  • Eszter Varsa (Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg): The prevention of “unwanted birth”: Racism and the politics of reproduction in Hungary, 1960s-1980s
  • Friederike Kind-Kovács (Regensburg University): The Body of the Starving Infant: An Object of Biopolitical Surveillance
  • Francesca Piana (Birkbeck College, London): ‘A Pioneer in the Euphrates Valley’: Ruth A. Parmelee and the Armenian Genocide
  • Sara Bernasconi (Zurich University): A Letter for Antonia Savić – Women’s Networks around a Midwife during WW1 in Bosnia-Herzegovina

2.30-3.30 p.m.     Roundtable III: Scale

  • Maria Zarifi (Hellenic Open University, Greece/ Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg): The role of the “Medical Committee” in controlling, professionalizing and standardizing the medical profession and public health in Greece, 1834-1924
  • Angelika Strobel (Zurich University): Sanitary Statistic and Hygiene Education: Public Health in Late Imperial Russia
  • Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck College, London): Relief after the Second World War: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and beyond
  • Tamara Scheer (Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institute, Vienna): What is typical Habsburg? Medical service and illness in the WWI diaries of k.u.k. soldiers

3.30-4.00 p.m.    Coffee Break

4.00-5.30 p.m.     Continuation of Roundtable III: Scale

Chair: Esther Wahlen (EUI Florence) with

  • Justyna Turkowska (Herder Institute, Marburg): In the battlefield of modernity: discourse controversies on medical modernization in the Prussian Province of Posen between 1900 and 1918
  • Katrin Steffen (North-East Institute, Lüneburg): Who belongs to the healthy body of the nation? An anthropological examination in Poland in the 1920ies
  • David Bryan (Birkbeck College, London): Franco’s internationalists: humanitarianism and international health under the Spanish dictatorship, 1939-1975
  • André Thiemann (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale): Bureaucratic Erring: Struggles over Social Policy in contemporary Serbian Welfare-State Relations

5.30-6.00 p.m.     Round-up