Johanna Conterio is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and received her PhD at Harvard University in the History Department in 2014.  Her research interests are at the intersection of the cultural, environmental and medical history of the Soviet Union. Her dissertation, The Soviet Sanatorium: Medicine, Nature and Mass Culture, 1917-1991, uses the sanatorium in the Soviet Union as a prism to explore scientific and popular medicine, architecture, urban planning, the transformation of the natural environment and the rise of mass tourism, emphasizing the intersection of ideas of nature and health in Soviet culture, while placing the Soviet sanatorium into the context of the Central European life reform movement and the therapeutic crisis of the interwar years. In her second project she will examine the role of Soviet public health activists in the  formation of public health institutions in the League of Nations, with particular focus on Soviet approaches to international pharmaceutical regulation and strategies of prevention.

Johanna has presented at conferences in Slavic studies, environmental history and medical history in Europe and North America. She has a MA in History from Harvard University and a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University.

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Selected Publications

  • “Our Black Sea’: The Sovietization of the Black Sea Coast under Khrushchev and the Problem of Overdevelopment,” in “The Black Sea in the Socialist World,” special forum, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (in press)
  • “Heating the Groves: Imported Technology, Transnational Scientific Networks and the Acclimatization of Citrus in the USSR, 1928-1941,” in Objects in Motion: Globalizing Technology, ed. Bryan Dewalt and Nina Möllers (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2016), 22-34
  • Places of Plenty: Patient Perspectives on Nutrition and Health in the Health Resorts of the USSR, 1917-1953,” Food & History 14, nos. 1-3 (2016): 113-140
  • “Beyond Liberal Internationalism,” in “Agents of Internationalism,” special issue, Contemporary European History 25, no. 2 (May 2016): 359-371. Co-Authors: Ana Antic and Dora Vargha.
  • “Inventing the Subtropics: An Environmental History of Sochi, 1928-1936,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, no.1 (Winter 2015): 91-120. Honourable mention, The European Society for Environmental History St Andrews Article Prize in European Environmental History