May Newsletter now available

8th June. 2022 – Sarah Howard will present a paper at Birkbeck at Birkbeck called ‘‘Feeding Babies, Making the State: Breastmilk as Political Substance in Ethiopia’.

8th-10th June, 2022
Lu Chen will give a presentation at the Afterlives of Epidemics Conference in Oslo
Keynote speakers Dora Vargha, University of Exeter Erica Charters, University of Oxford Jeremy Greene, John Hopkins University The outbreak of an epidemic is often easy to locate in time. It takes the form of an event, and as such, it can function as a great synchroniser of different forms of lives and times. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, the high potential of geographic spread associated with assumed high case fatality, and ensuing political panic accelerated political processes that are usually slow due to the impending need to contain the virus. The end of an epidemic, on the other hand, is more difficult to pinpoint. This can be attributed to the fact that the myriad actors involved in and affected by an epidemic operate on diverging time scales. Although seemingly synchronised from its outset, these lifetimes become un-synchronised as the epidemic unfolds. Some effects of an epidemic are easily observed, such as infection rates and number of deceased. Others – psychological, social and medical aftereffects, subtle changes in political priorities, or the lasting memory in a population – may be harder to spot. Declaring that an epidemic has ‘ended’ usually relies on the ceasing of the former effects, not the latter. The ending(s) of an epidemic can be regarded in the plural, each operating within its own rhythm and scale. In this conference, we invite papers exploring the multiplicity of afterlives of epidemics – human, microbial, institutional, geographical – and how they affect not only life after a pandemic but also our ability to deal with ‘the next’.

17th June, 2022 – Dora Vargha will present “Socialist internationalism in the making: Hungarian doctors in North Korea 1950-57” at Spaces of Transnational Solidarity workshop, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

22nd June, 2022 – Dora Vargha will present “Socialist medicine: alternative narratives for the history of global health”, webinar of the European Association for the History of Health and Medicine

6th July, 2022 – Dora Vargha will present “Social or Socialist? Ideology, Biomedicine, and Healthcare beyond the Iron Curtain” at the Forschungskolloquium zur Geschichte des Wissens, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin