July Newsletter

Posted by C3W Admin on July 16 2025

We have gathered together the latest news and events, and put it into a Newsletter, see below.

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NEWSLETTER JULY 2025

Welcome to this month’s newsletter.

Life doesn’t always go to plan, Thursday 10th July, I received messages to say the Ryanair details I had sent to Dora and Edna didn’t work. So a bit of magic from my laptop and I was able to send them the details so they could get a boarding pass. Sebastian has been having Visa issues and so needed to move his flights and was urgently asking for the cost code, I gave him the details. Then I get a message from Dora to say the trains have stopped at Cambridge and they are unable to make it to the airport for their flight (the taxi queue was very, very long). So more magic from my laptop gives them various flight options to choose from. I make the booking for the next morning, offer to book a hotel but they are unsure at that point how they would get there or where they will be to sleep, or even whether they would be travelling all night to Gatwick. I finished for the day and hoped they could make it work. I checked my phone though and figured no news was good news. What a day we all had.

Our team has been quite busy and they’ve shared some of their stories below—hope you enjoy reading them! The end-of-project conference is in the works, and we’ll have more details for you soon.

In the meantime, please take a moment to check out our latest publications and stories listed below and enjoy your summer.

Feel free to share with your friends and colleagues! Tell them to sign up using the subscribe button on our website to receive future issues straight to their inbox.

https://connecting3worlds.org/

News

On the 4th July, Dora Vargha was very happy to report that Liang Wan has passed his viva with flying colours – and no corrections! The photo shows them with the examiners and his co-supervisor Stacey Hynd enjoying a well-deserved glass of champagne in Exeter. Please join me in congratulating Dr. Liang Wan for this fantastic achievement!

His thesis is on the reinvention and globalisation of Chinese acupuncture and he will be moving to Vienna to take up a post-doc position in global health (but not quite yet!).

Edna Suárez-Díaz is doing a short research stay in Berlin. She will be a visiting scholar from early June to the end of August at the Department of History at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She is planning to do preliminary writing on a monograph for this project and research in the collections of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institute in Berlin.

Gisela Mateos was invited to participate as mentor at the History of Science Society Interdisciplinary Summer School at the University of Bologna, Italy, which took place on July 24-27, 2025. The HSS Summer School is an intensive workshop on the history of science for up to 12 graduate students and early career scholars, who have the opportunity to present their research and be mentored by a small group of faculty participants.

Presentations by the Project Team

In May Sarah Marks spoke on Cold War Czechoslovak psychological therapies at the University of Warwick as part of the Wellcome-funded workshop ‘Cultures of Trauma in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe’ organised by Dr Anna Toropova.

Sarah Howard was a panellist at ‘Plural Worlds’ – CHASE Encounters Conference’ held at Birkbeck in June, for a session discussing postdoctoral careers.

In June Sarah Howard attended a workshop on Media Training for Academics, organised by Sarah Marks and Becka Hudson, drawing on their experiences on TV, live radio, podcasting and as sources. Among other advice and techniques, the training covered strategies for staying on message, deflecting hostile or aggressive interviewing, and negotiating with producers.

Edna Suarez-Diaz, Dora Vargha and Sarah Marks presented a roundtable on ‘Collaborations in Twentieth Century Science, Technology and Medicine’ at the British Society for the History of Science conference in Cambridge on the 9th of July, along with Rosanna Dent and Soraya de Chadarevian.

Abstract:

Cooperation, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity have been key structuring concepts for funding agencies and government support for academic knowledge production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Celebrated–often uncritically–as the key to addressing major challenges of research, design, and development, these recurring concepts have histories of their own, including within discourses in the history of science. By bringing together a group of historians who explore knowledge-producing practices linking distant geographies and cultures (Western scientists and Indigenous communities in Brazil, Eastern Europeans collaborating with Asian and African countries after decolonization, or Mexican scientists participating in global research projects), we will explore how our historical actors understood the value and practical challenges of collaboration, including the ways in which they experienced and proactively engaged with real and perceived asymmetries. Actors in socialist and non-aligned countries actively pursued alternative developmentalist projects, many of which emphasize the porous and incomplete divisions of the three worlds system. As historians of science, we also mobilize the concepts of collaboration and networks to make sense of these histories, and will consider what is made visible and invisible through these frames. Understanding the history of science itself as a product of post-war and Cold War reconfigurations of academia, we bring these questions to reflect on our research practices. How do our studies of the history of collaboration shape the ways we work across politico-national, linguistic, and socioeconomic experiences? This roundtable will discuss transnational post-war science, medicine, and technology collaborations while reflexively examining our own collaborative knowledge-making practices.

Publications

Dora Vargha has written an article for the European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health titled Socialist Health: of Shortages. An Introduction

In a relatively little-known essay titled “The Health of Nations”, the prominent Hungarian economist and analyst of shortage economies János Kornai drew parallels between the fields of medicine and economy; in so doing he discussed the ‘diseases’ that may plague economic systems, the therapies that may be brought to bear on these systems, and the pessimism and optimism that may drive medical professionals and economists respectively. Unsurprisingly, shortage is one of the seven diseases identified by Kornai…………

https://brill.com/view/journals/ehmh/82/1/article-p3_002.xml

Latest Blog

Sarah Howard recently presented at the European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) 2025, held in Prague. You can read her report on the papers and panels most of interest for C3W in her blog here

https://connecting3worlds.org/african-afropean-afropolitan-report-from-the-european-conference-on-african-studies-ecas-2025/