1-2 July 2015 | Joint Network Meeting | Birkbeck College, University of London
Co-organised by the German Research Foundation Network ‘Social Welfare and Health Care in Eastern and Southeastern Europe during the Long 20th Century’ (Regensburg University, Germany) and The Reluctant Internationalists (Birkbeck, University of London)

This joint network meeting will discuss the current research of each group’s members, with a special emphasis on sources related to health and welfare.

Programme

Wednesday, 1 July 2015

4-4.30             Welcome Note (Jessica Reinisch/ Friederike Kind-Kovács)  & Introduction of all participants

4.30-6 p.m.     Public keynote lecture: Prof. Paul Lerner (University of Southern California, USC): War Trauma and the Historiography of Psychiatry (Chair: Heike Karge)

Thursday, July 2nd

9.30-11.00 a.m. Roundtable I: Disease and Illness

Chair: Friederike Kind-Kovacs (Regensburg University)

    • Indira Duraković (University of Teacher Education Styria/University of Graz): Marginalisation and Public Health in 19th century
    • 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

    11-11.30         Coffee Break

    11.30-1.15 p.m. Roundtable II: Family and Childhood

    Chair: Heike Karge (Regensburg University)

    • 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

    13.15-2 p.m.   Lunch Break at Birkbeck

    2.00-3.30 p.m. Roundtable III: Scale

    Chair: Eszter Varsa (IOS Regensburg)

    • 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)

    • 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