Call for papers: Fighting pandemics in South-East Europe: experts, infrastructure, and technologies in the long 19th century

 Call for papers: Fighting pandemics in South-East Europe: experts, infrastructure, and technologies in the long 19th century - New Europe College, Bucharest, 17.10.2024 - 18.10.2024, deadline 12.05.2024

States mobilised enormous human, material and financial resources in their fight against pandemic diseases such as plague or cholera. Not only medical professionals or public health officials, but also border guards, police and bureaucrats played their part in coordinating states’ pandemic efforts. Quarantine stations were set up on the frontlines of defence, at some of the busiest ports and border crossings, but were challenged by increased mobility, the transport revolution and market integration in an era of rapid globalisation. As quarantine restrictions became increasingly unpopular with both medical professionals and the general public, authorities turned to other preventive measures: from investment in urban sanitation infrastructure (sewers or waste disposal) to public health campaigns aimed at educating the public about the importance of individual and community hygiene practices. Authorities also encouraged a joint transnational effort against pandemic threats, and their collaboration led to international health conferences and conventions that mandated standardised preventive epidemiological measures. Medical cooperation – and competition – led to scientific breakthroughs, such as the germ theory of disease and the emergence of microbiology, which shifted the battle to prevent pandemics to, for example, bacteriological laboratories and the use of all sorts of new chemical technologies to destroy deadly bacteria.

With such general considerations in mind, this workshop aims to look at the people, infrastructures and technologies used by states in South-East Europe to prevent, control and treat disease. Situated at the crossroads of empires and along important transport corridors between East and West and North and South, Balkan states such as Bulgaria, Greece, Romania or Serbia – and their imperial neighbours – provide fascinating case studies for tracing the evolution of pandemic responses and various entanglements across state and imperial borders.

We welcome proposals of around 250 words on the above topics by 12 May 2024, together with a short biography or CV. Proposals should be sent to cardeleanu@nec.ro and ardcons@gmail.com. Decisions on accepted proposals will be announced by 26 May 2024.

Travel costs and accommodation

Travel expenses will be reimbursed, and accommodation and meals will be provided for invited speakers.

This conference is organized within the research project ‘Entangled Histories of the Danubian Quarantine System (1774–1914)’, Exploratory Research PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-1374 funded by UEFISCDI.

Call for papers: Geometry in Society: A historical Perspective. June 12-14, 2024. Brno.

 Call for papers: Geometry in Society: A historical Perspective. June 12-14, 2024. Brno. 

Full cfp: https://0ca5d81399.cbaul-cdnwnd.com/dc7aa7484dcce086160359633836b64e/200000101-7926079262/maths_and_society_2024_CfP.pdf?ph=0ca5d81399 . 

Of all areas of Mathematics, Geometry is the most directly available to everybody. Geometry is hidden in each building, even though we tend to admire only the exquisite ones, like the Dome in Florence or the Notre Dame. Similarly, many paintings may be analysed from the point of view of perspective, and the words "Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here," inscribed above the door of Plato's Academy are a common knowledge. In short, Geometry is all around us.

In his 1935 book Geometry and Art in the Past, the geometer František Kadeřávek explained the subtle connections between Geometry, Architecture, and even human life itself, noting that "the disciple of masonry [...] knew well that the masonry trowel levels the unevenness of the plaster, that the plum line will always end up in the vertical. These tools always reminded him that by his behaviour, he must always be a sincere man with an upright spine, free, who does not bow and scrape to anybody."

On the superficial level, knowledge of Geometry had to be demonstrated by novices to the craft: the ability to perform the complex construction underlying the signature in stone was a sort of an entrance test. Teaching of Geometry at schools have required patience and skilful teachers and it has also involved spatial imagination. It has been taught through Euclid's Elements, but also through less rigid forms in drawing classes.

In the wake of the 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt said that "whatever relates to extent and quantity may be represented by geometrical figures". Soon, the perception of Geometry underwent a major change as a result of the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, in which Riemann's habilitation lecture also played a role.

Hand in hand with the radical evolution of the understanding of Geometry as a science that is not always intuitive, the use of the well-known intuitive elementary geometry brought wealth and esteem. In Bohemia, the architect Josef Hlávka used his wealth to promote Science and founded the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1890 and acted as its first President. Around the turn of the 20th century, the eminent mathematician David Hilbert began his foundational work in the mathematical sciences by publishing Grundlagen der Geometrie, while other branches of mathematics should have followed.

Choosing a suitable geometric interpretation was also an issue connected with Einstein's relativity theory, where dealing with the curvature of the space time was a major challenge, keeping the differential geometers busy throughout the interbellum and even beyond.

We invite scholars to send abstracts of their proposed talks (between 200 and 500 words) to jan.kotulek@vsb.cz by 15 May 2024. Notification of acceptance by 20 May 2024.

Topics include, but are not limited to the history of:

mutual connections of Geometry and Arts, of Geometry and Physics, etc.

Geometry and spatial imagination (History of Mathematics Education),

Geometry in Engineering, Nomography and other outdated disciplines ,

History of geometric models.

Selected papers may be published in a special issue of the journal History of Sciences and Technology https://dvt-journal.cz/en/ (ISSN 0300-4414 print, 2788-3485 online).

Conference fee: EUR 30 or CZK 600, payable on site or through bank transfer.

Contact e-mail: hdurnova@ped.muni.cz

Tomasz Pudłocki: Szekspir i Polska. Życie Władysława Tarnawskiego (1885 - 1951) [Shakespeare and Poland. Life of Władysława Tarnawskiego (1885-1951)

Tomasz Pudłocki: Szekspir i Polska. Życie Władysława Tarnawskiego (1885 - 1951) [Shakespeare and Poland. Life of Władysława Tarnawskiego (1885-1951)], Rzeszów–Warszawa: IPN 2023. ISBN: 978-83-822-9782-9

Władysław Tarnawski (1885-1951), profesor filologii angielskiej Uniwersytetów Jana Kazimierza we Lwowie i Jagiellońskiego oraz przywódca lwowskiej endecji pod koniec życia przyznawał, że w swojej działalności naukowej czegokolwiek by nie zgłębiał, zawsze odnosiło się to do Szekspira: "[.] mogę powiedzieć, że Szekspir czasem wplątywał się w moje życia i w tok wypadków, które na nie oddziaływały". Angielski poeta był zatem dla uczonego pewnym stałym punktem odniesienia, z którym nie rozstawał się nawet w stalinowskim więzieniu, w ostatnich miesiącach życia. Po latach został zapamiętany głównie jako tłumacz całej twórczości Szekspira i jedyny polski uczony, który podjął się tego zadania. Wynikało to ze specyficznego paradoksu - najpierw był niewygodny jako jeden z tych, którzy przeciwstawili się ugruntowywaniu systemu komunistycznego, a potem dla piewców II Rzeczpospolitej, jako krytyk systemu sanacyjnego i narodowiec-antysemita. Zatem Tarnawski nie tylko dwukrotnie zapłacił bardzo wysoką cenę za swoje zaangażowanie polityczne, ale i nie pasował do wizji swego narodu kreowanej przez Polaków z pierwszej połowy XX w., którą promowano po 1989 r. Dokonywano na nim swego rodzaju operacji pamięci, a więc wycinano lub przynajmniej gładko obchodzono te elementy jego biografii, które nie pasowały do wzniosłej wizji męczennika nauki - ofiary stalinowskiej walki przeciwko polskim intelektualistom. Tymczasem jego biografia jest dużo bardziej skomplikowana, a przez to interesująca. Z książki wyłania się dziennikarz, teatrolog, popularyzator kultury europejskiej, baczny obserwator życia politycznego i polityki zagranicznej okresu międzywojennego, który łączył pracę na uniwersytecie z szeroką działalnością w życiu publicznym i społecznym, dla którego polski Lwów był swoistego rodzaju "centrum świata".

Call for Papers: The Counter-University. Histories, Movements, and Ambitions

 Call for Papers: The Counter-University. Histories, Movements, and Ambitions

The declaration of “counter-universities” has been part of activists’ repertoires for many decades. The practice became known primarily through the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Since the mid-1960s, numerous “free” universities have emerged in the USA in the context of protests for “free speech” and against the Vietnam War. At the latest, the transnational protest events of 1967/1968 made the declaration of “free”, “critical”, “political” or “autonomous” universities common practice in many Western European countries. Since then, the creation of counter-universities has served as an influential tool of developing critique of science and higher education, as well as imagining potentially more satisfactory approaches to higher learning and knowledge formation.

This conference invites scholars interested in the history and present of the counter-university to share their ideas on this significant yet under-researched transnational phenomenon. Despite the wide spread and centrality of the counter-university, research so far has hesitated to approach the phenomenon and its diverse manifestations as spatially as well as temporally connected. Therefore, this conference is dedicated to open a discussion about counter-universities’ pasts and presents and to assess their role in world-wide struggles for social and educational reforms.

In particular, we are looking for case studies as well as broader comparative and analytical papers that situate the phenomenon in the history of protest, counterculture and higher education. Among others, we welcome papers from history, history of education, history of science, art history, cultural studies, sociology, and social movements studies.

We particularly welcome contributions addressing the following topics:

“Political”/”Critical”/”Free”/”Anti”-universities of the 1960s and 70s, and their offshoots

Women’s universities; feminist university projects; gay and queer counter-universities

Counter-universities and learning spaces in art (historical and contemporary)

“Democratic”/”citizens’”/”people’s” universities; counter-universities and trade unions

Ecological and green counter-universities’ past and present

Mobile/Travelling Universities

Populist and right-wing counter-universities

Counter-universities and social struggles of the present

PLEASE NOT: state reform projects in higher education, if there is no direct connection to movement’s / artists’ activities

Analytical angles may be, but are not limited to:

Creating the counter-university: constitution, protest forms, ambitions and aesthetics

Critique of universities, higher learning and science (as it is/was); concepts of improving learning and research; utopias of scientific communities and knowledge formation

Counter-universities’ everyday; content and forms of learning and teaching; didactics, exams and certificates; impact on/interaction with individual disciplines and curriculum development in the regular university

Media usage; media formats; modes of communication

Relations to social movements; relation to reform projects inside academia

Interactions/conflicts with regular universities and politics; relation to state level politics /state reform projects

Impact/consequences, both to individual biographies and science/education at large

The conference will take place at the University of Copenhagen, February 12–14, 2025, and is organized by Susanne Schregel and Detlef Siegfried (both Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen).

If you are interested in participating, please submit your abstract (of no more than 500 words, for a presentation of about 30 minutes) to susanneschregel@hum.ku.dk by May 16, 2024.

Decisions on the acceptance or rejection of proposals will be announced by the end of May 2024.

We intend to publish the outcomes.

The organizers will apply for funding to assist with travel and accommodation costs.

In case of any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers via email.

Deadline for abstracts: 16 May 2024

Decisions by: 31 May 2024

Conference Date: 12–14 February 2025

Conference Venue: University of Copenhagen

Contact: susanneschregel@hum.ku.dk

Contact Information

Susanne Schregel

Contact Email

susanneschregel@hum.ku.dk

Vernacular Medicine in Tashkent/ Space Botany in Art. Online colloquium by Chorus group

Online event by CHORUS: Colloquium for the History of Russian and Soviet Science , Thursday, May 16, at 8 am (Los Angeles) / 11 аm (New York) / 17:00 (CET) / 18:00 (Kyiv) / 19:00 (UTC+03:00)

Maria Pirogovskaya (independent researcher, Berlin), Vernacular bone-setting and Tashkent Institute for Traumatology and Orthopaedic Treatment in the post-war era: Knowledge colonised, appropriated or ‘braided’?

Ilona Jurkonytė (Vilnius University), Configurations of Space Botany in Art

(for link to the meeting please write to jan.surman@gmail.com)

Details:

Maria Pirogovskaya (independent researcher, Berlin), Vernacular bone-setting and Tashkent Institute for Traumatology and Orthopaedic Treatment in the post-war era: Knowledge colonised, appropriated or ‘braided’?

In 1953, an Uzbek military doctor submitted a medical dissertation on the topic of Central Asian vernacular bone-setting. While framed as a quackery and a threat for the Soviet public health, bone-setting practiced by urban healers was nevertheless considered worthy of painstaking inspection both by the aspiring postgraduate surgeon and his supervisors in Tashkent Clinic for Traumatology and Orthopaedic Treatment. In the next decades, vernacular methods, skills, and particularly medicinal matter were carefully explored and tested, which changed the surgeon’s career as well as epistemic and social trajectories of the phenomena under his study. The talk focuses on extractive-cum-cooperative relationships between state-sponsored medical research and vernacular healing and discusses the heuristic potential of frameworks of colonisation, appropriation, and braiding in regard of ethnic knowledge in the long shadow of Soviet medicine.

Maria Pirogovskaya is medical anthropologist and historian of medicine. Her research interests include subjectivity, therapeutic landscapes, knowledge systems, and the senses in late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. She is the author of Miasmata, Symptoms, and Evidence: Smells in Russian Culture, 1850–1900s (in Russian) (European Univ. Press, 2018), which discusses the social and cultural entanglements of olfactory vigilance, public health, and modernism in the Russian Empire. Her current research projects focus on the legacies of imperial medicine after the Russian Revolution and the history of the interaction of the ethnomedical knowledge of Eastern Siberia and Central Asia with Soviet state medicine.

https://mpiwg-berlin-mpg.academia.edu/MariaPirogovskaya

Ilona Jurkonytė (Vilnius University), Configurations of Space Botany in Art

The first complete plant growth cycle in zero gravity was achieved in the early 1980s by the Soviet scientific institutions that were stretched across the USSR. That period was the peak of Cold War tensions and international campaigning for nuclear disarmament. Collaboration between Soviet and Western scientists took place, yet all international communications went through Moscow and thus the visibility of contributions by non-Russian USSR scientists on a global scale was erased. This condition exemplified the dynamics in both science and cultural productions of the entire USSR. In this talk, I invite us to think together, how can we research the history of space botany today? What are the limitations of the Cold War epistemic framing? What methodological approaches could be useful when investigating the history of space botany from a perspective of a fragment of the space research infrastructure? What could film and media studies, as well as artistic research, bring to this area of exploration?

A link to compilation of excerpts from audiovisual installation Arabidopsis Thaliana, Museum of Modern Art Bogota 2021, co-authored by Ilona Jurkonytė and Santiago Reyes Villaveces https://vimeo.com/542859164

Ilona Jurkonytė is a film and media researcher and a Vilnius University Foundation Scholar. Previously Ilona was a Vanier Scholar at Concordia University (2015-2019), where she defended her PhD in Film and Moving Image program. Her background that merges philosophy (BA), art history and criticism (MA), media and communication studies (MA), and film and moving image studies (PhD). Her research interests span transnational film studies, environmental media studies, artistic research and film curation. Ilona’s work critically examines tensions between notions of the national and transnational in moving image production and circulation, as well as their geo- and hydro- political implications. She engages with environmental media approach to rethink coloniality in the Global Easts and beyond. Ilona is currently preparing a manuscript, based on her doctoral research, entitled “From Temperature of the War to Descending Clouds: US Bomb Archive and the Marshall Islands.” The project reconceptualizes the relationship between nuclear media archives, militarization, and the environment.

https://www.tspmi.vu.lt/en/zmogus/ilona-jurkonyte/

Per Högselius, Achim Klüppelberg: The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism

Per Högselius, Achim Klüppelberg: The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism. Budapest, New York: CEU University Press 2024. ISBN: 978-963-386-647-4

Open access: https://ceupress.com/sites/ceupress.ceu.edu/files/the_soviet_nuclear_archipelago.pdf

The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance.

The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure. The key concept is that of the archipelago – a network of nuclear facilities spread throughout the Soviet territory, but mutually reliant on each other and densely connected.

The story traces the emergence of nuclear science and technology for military and civilian purposes through to the post-Soviet Russian nuclear corporations as providers of resources and technology. The book explains how nuclear developments in the Soviet Union interacted with processes of environmental and landscape change. The spatial lens offers an analytically fruitful and pedagogically stimulating way to comprehend the nuclear histories of the Soviet Union and its successor states.

East Central Europe, Volume 51 (2024): Issue 1 (Mar 2024): Special Issue: Biopolitics, socialism and the democratization of healthcare. Case studies from state-socialist Hungary,

 East Central Europe, Volume 51 (2024): Issue 1 (Mar 2024): Special Issue: Biopolitics, socialism and the democratization of healthcare. Case studies from state-socialist Hungary, edited by Viola Lászlófi

Articles:

Svégel, Fanni. "Feminist Mobilization for Reproductive Rights in State Socialist Hungary: The Abortion Petition Campaign of 1973", East Central Europe 51, 1 (2024): 1-25, doi: https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-51010006

Lászlófi, Viola. "(Un)disciplined Patients, (Un)controlled Medical Authority?: Governmentality and the Changing Norms of Healthcare in State Socialist Hungary", East Central Europe 51, 1 (2024): 26-52, doi: https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-51010004

Horváth, Zsolt K. "The Psychopathology of Allusion in the Kádár Era: “Marginality” and the Figure of “Hiding” in the Thought of Ferenc Mérei", East Central Europe 51, 1 (2024): 53-81, doi: https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-51010001

Individual Submissions

Isański, Jakub. "Liberation, Resettlement, and Looting in Postwar Memoirs from Poland", East Central Europe 51, 1 (2024): 83-107, doi: https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-51010003

Hoxha, Artan R. "Why Did Albanians Protect Jews during the Holocaust?: Albanian Historiography and New Insights from Oral Histories", East Central Europe 51, 1 (2024): 108-128, doi: https://doi.org/10.30965/18763308-51010002