Conference report: Russia’s Politics of Truth and its Quest for Alliance in the Global South

 Lilú Kruspe / Sascha R. Harnisch, Conference report: Russia’s Politics of Truth and its Quest for Alliance in the Global South, in: H-Soz-Kult, 12.06.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-155611.

CFP: « Protect and Control. The Politics of Uncertainty and Danger in the Soviet Union (Second Half of the Twentieth Century) »

 Dear colleagues, 

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the workshop entitled « Protect and Control. The Politics of Uncertainty and Danger in the Soviet Union (Second Half of the Twentieth Century) » to be held on April 16 and 17, 2026 at the Maison Française in Oxford.

URL: https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-154313

While being less spectacular than terror and repression, the Soviet state’s efforts to protect the population from uncertainty and dangers were also instrumental for reshaping the relationship between state and society. Constructing an unforeseen event or danger as a social problem, taking protective measures and determining the conditions to compensate victims and anticipating the future – this is how we characterise the ‘politics of uncertainty and danger’. This workshop aims to clarify the paradox whereby the regime was attacked by the Soviets on the basis of its inability to protect them, despite its having reaffirmed its protective nature by implementing security measures.

This workshop aims to produce a collective publication in English and article proposals are expected by 15 June 2025.

Best regards,

Katja Doose, Grégory Dufaud, Anna Safronova

Darya Tsymbalyuk: Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia's War.

 Darya Tsymbalyuk: Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia's War. Polity press 2025. ISBN: 9781509562497. 

URL: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=ecocide-in-ukraine-the-environmental-cost-of-russias-war--9781509562497

Russia’s war on Ukraine has not only destroyed millions of human lives, it has also been catastrophic for the environment. Forests and fields have been burned to the ground, animal and plant species pushed to the brink of extinction, soil and water contaminated with oil products, debris, and mines.  On a single day in June 2023, the breached Kakhovka Dam flooded thousands of kilometres of protected natural habitat, as well as villages, towns, and agricultural land. The devastation of biodiversity and ecosystems across Ukraine has been immeasurable, long-lasting and its consequences stretch beyond national borders.

 

In this poignant book, Ukrainian researcher Darya Tsymbalyuk offers an intimate portrait of her beloved homeland against the backdrop of Russia’s war and ecocide. In elegant and moving prose, she describes the damage to the country’s rivers, the grasslands of the steppes, animals, insects, and colonies of birds, as a result of Russia’s ground and air operations.  Alongside the everyday experiences of people in Ukraine living with the environmental consequences of the war, we share Tsymbalyuk’s own reckoning with the changing nature of cherished places and the loss of familiar worlds caused by the ongoing Russian invasion.

Н. С. Калинин (ed..) Математики Санкт-Петербурга и их открытия.

 Н. С. Калинин (ed..) Математики Санкт-Петербурга и их открытия. Сборник статей [St. Petersburg Mathematicians and their Discoveries. Collection of Articles]. МЦНМО 2025. ISBN: 978-5-4439-1917-1

В книге рассказаны биографии 45 математиков, чья жизнь и/или работа была тесно связана с Санкт-Петербургом-Петроградом-Ленинградом. Большая часть биографий снабжена рассказами о научных достижениях их героев. Для широкого круга читателей.

Medicina antiqua, mediaevalis et moderna

 Lucyna Kostuch, Sylwia Konarska-Zimnicka, Beata Wojciechowska red., Medicina antiqua, mediaevalis et moderna. Historia – filozofia – religia (IV), 2025, 421 s.

Publikacja prezentuje wybrane aspekty badań nad medycyną starożytną, średniowieczną i nowożytną, uwidaczniając dziedzictwo historyczne w tym zakresie i wpływy kulturowe dostrzegalne zarówno w czasie jak i przestrzeni. Opracowanie zawiera teksty dotyczące historii medycyny europejskiej, w tym polskiego dorobku na przestrzeni dziejów. Wieloautorska monografia przedstawia badania w obszarze historii medycyny, które łączą elementów dorobku różnych dyscyplin nauki: medycyny, przyrodoznawstwa, historii, historii nauki, historii religii, historii sztuki, filozofii, teologii, filologii i archeologii. W publikacji analizie poddano liczne zagadnienia badawcze: medyczne właściwości przyrody; opisane w świadectwach źródłowych: choroby kobiece, męskie i dziecięce; choroby psychiczne; choroby i metody leczenia utrwalone w literaturze różnych gatunków, zachowane traktaty i teorie medyczne; kwestia statusu lekarza w różnych epokach historycznych, znani lekarze w dziejach; choroby sławnych postaci historycznych; rozwój szpitalnictwa; astrologia medyczna; wpływ klimatu na stan zdrowia człowieka, medyczne praktyki magiczne; epidemie.

Spis treści

WPROWADZENIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    7

ANNA MARIA WAJDA – Oczyszczające i lecznicze właściwości wody w świetle tekstów biblijnych i pozabiblijnych. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

LUCYNA KOSTUCH – Koper, wąż i antyczna medycyna. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

TATIANA KRYNICKA – Izydor z Sewilli o medycynie (Etymologie, księga IV). . . . 49

KAROL ZDZIECH – Metafory o charakterze medycznym w listach papieża Grzegorza VII. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

MATEUSZ FITAS – Zabiegi medyczne w świetle arabskiego traktatu Albucasisa (936–1013). Współczesny komentarz medyczny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

BEATA WOJCIECHOWSKA – O zachowaniu lekarza w świetle dwunastowiecznego traktatu z Salerno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

ANNA GŁUSIUK – Mistrz Bernardus Provincialis o afrodyzjakach, anafrodyzjakach, sposobach na niepłodność i środkach stosowanych

podczas porodu w traktacie pod tytułem Commentarium super tabulas Salerni. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

KRZYSZTOF RATAJCZAK – Szpitalnictwo w zakonie świętego Jana Jerozolimskiego w średniowieczu. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

JERZY RAJMAN – Lekarze krakowscy (1278–1400). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

ZOFIA WILK-WOŚ – Medyk o medykach. Lekarze w dziele Chronica Polonorum Macieja z Miechowa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

SYLWIA KONARSKA-ZIMNICKA, MATEUSZ FITAS – Wątki jatromatematyczne w Introductorium astrologie compendiosum Wacława z Krakowa . . . . . . . . . 189

PIOTR KARDYŚ – Inkunabuły „medyczne” w zbiorze inkunabułów  biblioteki PAU i PAN w Krakowie. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

KATARZYNA JUSTYNIARSKA-CHOJAK – Traktaty medyczne w księgozbiorach mieszczańskich (w świetle inwentarzy pośmiertnych z XVI–XVIII wieku). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

MAŁGORZATA KRZYSZTOFIK – Infirmaria chrześcijańska Mikołaja z Mościsk (1624). Dyskurs medyczny i religijny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

JACEK PIELAS – Sadyzm i choroba umysłowa w środowisku magnackim dawnej Rzeczypospolitej. Casus Warszyckich herbu Awdaniec w XVII wieku. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

ANNA SZYLAR – „Na ukąszenie żmii i psa wściekłego” – receptury na medykamenty wyrabiane domowym sposobem (druga połowa XVIII wieku) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

TADEUSZ SROGOSZ – Receptury Karla Franza Heintza w czasie 

 epidemii dżumy w latach 1780–1781. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

TOMASZ CIESIELSKI – Służby medyczno-sanitarne w armiach Rzeczypospolitej w czasach saskich. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295

MARIUSZ NOWAK – Wykorzystanie wód termalnych do celów leczniczych w spiskim uzdrojowisku Vyšnie Ružbachy w XIX–XX wieku (do 1939 roku) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319

SARAH TAYLOR-JASKÓLSKA – Od „zdrowego” rozsądku do wiedzy medycznej: zdrowie publiczne w wiktoriańskiej Anglii. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337

KAMIL SZPUNAR – Obraz szydłowieckiej apteki w świetle  dokumentów z pierwszej połowy XIX wieku . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347

MARTA KŁAK-AMBROŻKIEWICZ – Emocje, choroby i sposoby leczenia – z życia artysty Jana Matejki. Pierś pelikana. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

PAWEŁ PRYT – „Co do mego zdrowia…” – wyjazdy do uzdrowisk rodziny Wielopolskich w XIX oraz pierwszej w połowie XX wieku. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383

JERZY GAPYS, FILIP ŁOBODA – Epidemia tyfusu plamistego w więzieniu kieleckim w latach 1918–1919. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395

VARIA

MICHAŁ M. SKOCZYLAS – Wyrazy pamięci o dawnych medykach i ich dorobek naukowy w ofercie turystycznej polskich miast i wsi – stan obecny i propozycje rozwoju . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409

Medicine on a Larger Scale: Global Histories of Social Medicine

 Lie, Anne Kveim, Jeremy A. Greene, and Warwick Anderson, eds. Medicine on a Larger Scale: Global Histories of Social Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. ISBN: 9781009428514. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009428514. Open access.

Book description

In a world of growing health inequity and ecological injustice, how do we revitalize medicine and public health to tackle new problems? This groundbreaking collection draws together case studies of social medicine in the Global South, radically shifting our understanding of social science in healthcare. Looking beyond a narrative originating in nineteenth-century Europe, a team of expert contributors explores a far broader set of roots and branches, with nodes in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Asia. This plural approach reframes and decolonizes the study of social medicine, highlighting connections to social justice and health equity, social science and state formation, bottom-up community initiatives, grassroots movements, and an array of revolutionary sensibilities. As a truly global history, this book offers a more usable past to imagine a new politics of social medicine for medical professionals and healthcare workers worldwide. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Reviews

‘Medicine on a Larger Scale offers multiple visions of social medicine as an idea, field of research and teaching, form of practice, critique of health policy, and approach to the Planet’s problems. This intriguing and useful collection also places social medicine in a truly global context and gives voice to social medicine traditions form the South that are less well-known than the stories it also presents from Euro-American history. A step forward in imagining a counter-biomedicine that can better connect social suffering and healing with interpretive social science, post-colonial imaginings, and some of the more serious problems of the world. Impressive!’

Arthur Kleinman - Harvard University

‘This impressive and timely work brings together contributions from a wide range of scholars to illuminate the historical basis of social medicine. The contributors show us that the lessons are highly relevant to contemporary challenges and why reimagining social medicine in the light of current realities can help to address them.’

Andy Haines - London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

‘This collection of essays is pivotal to understanding the historical urgency of global public health. The political visibility of that urgency is embedded in global histories of social medicine movements that asked what are the social determinants of population health in post-colonial worlds. Collectively these essays powerfully demonstrate the interrogative necessity of historical analysis in order to address crippling global inequalities in health, premature mortality and debilitating morbidities.’

Dorothy Porter - University of California, San Francisco

CFP: Trauma, Institutional Knowledge, and Social Order

 CFP: Trauma, Institutional Knowledge, and Social Order: New Perspectives from Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War - Graz 12/2025

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This explorative workshop investigates institutional and praxeological approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe after 1945. It investigates the making of trauma through broad political, ideological, environmental or social transformations in the Cold War period through processes of making visible, pathologization, legitimization, or denial. The workshop seeks to uncover specifically European trajectories in the conceptual and institutional history of 'trauma’.

Trauma, Institutional Knowledge, and Social Order: New Perspectives from Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War

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Institute of History, Department of Southeast European History and Anthropology, University of Graz; Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité Berlin; German Police University, Münster, 8010 Graz (Austria)

03.12.2025 - 05.12.2025

Bewerbungsschluss: 01.07.2025

How did “trauma” emerge as a therapeutic concept, political discourse, and administrative practice in Europe during the Cold War? How was it treated or silenced, conceptualized or classified? What role did psychiatric diagnoses, forensic reports, police investigations, and bureaucratic procedures play in shaping societal responses to events such as political violence, armed conflicts, displacement, natural catastrophes, epidemics, or other structural forms of harm?

This explorative workshop investigates institutional and praxeological approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe after 1945. It investigates the making of trauma through broad political, ideological, environmental or social transformations in the Cold War period through processes of making visible, pathologization, legitimization, or denial. Moving beyond studies focused solely on World War II and its long-term psychological consequences, we aim to understand the Cold War as a period of continued upheaval, producing new institutional responses to psychic distress while shaped by the legacies of previous violence. In doing so, the workshop seeks to uncover specifically European trajectories in the conceptual and institutional history of 'trauma’.

The workshop focuses on institutional archives and documentary sources - psychiatric and therapeutic case files, forensic assessments, hospital records, bureaucratic documents, police files, and court proceedings. These materials reveal how societies perceived, managed, and classified mental suffering - or failed to do so - under specific historical conditions. We engage with recent historiographical debates that challenge the simplistic East–West dichotomy. The assumption that Western societies openly addressed psychic suffering while the East repressed it has proven increasingly inadequate. Instead, evidence suggests that similar diagnostic and administrative frameworks were in place across both systems until around 1980, with mental suffering often recognized only when considered temporary and treatable. Diagnoses such as “superficial neurosis” in Yugoslavia or “gross stress reaction” in the DSM-I exemplify these limitations in collective recognition.

We invite contributions based on institutional sources that examine how psychic distress was defined, regulated, or marginalized in diverse national and political contexts across Europe during the Cold War.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

- Psychiatric, legal, and other administrative approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe

- Diagnostic strategies: between pathologization and normalization, acknowledgement and ignorance

- Forensic reports, police files, and psychiatric records as sources for the history of trauma

- The relationship between political repression, mental distress, and medical classification

- Social, gender, environmental, health, and economic dimensions of the (non-)recognition of psychic vulnerability

- Institutional logics in addressing war trauma, imprisonment-related suffering, and structural violence

- Interactions between medical knowledge, administrative practices, and norms of psychological normalcy

Date: 3–5 December 2025

Location: University of Graz, Institute of History

We plan to circulate working papers beforehand to allow for in-depth discussion and exchange during the workshop. The workshop language is English. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered.

Submission:

Please send your abstract (max. 300 words) and a short biographical note (max. 150 words) by 1 July 2025 to:

heike.karge@uni-graz.at

Notification of acceptance: by 15 July 2025.

Deadline for paper submission: 3 November 2025.

The Global Campus: Academic Fiction in World Literature

 World Literature Studies 1/2025 “The Global Campus: Academic Fiction in World Literature / Globálny kampus: akademická fikcia vo svetovej literatúre”EDITORIÁL/EDITORIAL

Open access: https://www.sav.sk/?lang=sk&doc=journal-list&part=list_articles&journal_issue_no=11117582

Blashkiv, O.: The global campus: Academic fiction in world literature. (s. 2)

ŠTÚDIE/ARTICLES

Moseley, M.: Globalism, then and now: The rise of international neoliberalism and the academic novel. (s. 3)

Blashkiv, O.: Central European perspectives of the global campus: Slavic academic fiction after 1989. (s. 16)

Gaidash, A.: Aging professors: Reading transatlantic academic plays of the 1990s. (s. 30)

Perkowska-Gawlik, E.: The academic murder mystery as a popular subgenre from the Polish perspective. (s. 41)

Hrtánek, P.: The campus novel and university satire in recent Czech literature. (s. 56)

Selejan, C.: Magical realism and the othering of the academic in three Romanian postcommunist novels. (s. 71)

Koval, M.: The American university in the aftermath of 9/11 in Susan Choi’s novel A Person of Interest. (s. 85)

Anténe, P.: “The inhospitable city”: A Spanish view of Oxford in Javier Marías’s All Souls. (s. 97)

Šedíková Čuhová, P. - Kubealaková, M.: The Perlmann crisis of the academic world. (s. 109)

Mengel, E.: The university as heterotopia in Tabea Mußgnug’s Nächstes Semester wird alles anders.... (s. 123)

Hansen, J.: A tale of two professions in the Swedish campus novel Vård, skola och omsorg. (s. 137)

MATERIÁLY/MATERIALS

Kirova, M.: The phenomenon of the “Professorenroman” in Bulgarian literature. (s. 147)

RECENZIE/BOOK REVIEWS

Gáfrik, R.: SHUNQING CAO – PEINA ZHUANG: A New Introduction to Comparative Literature: From a Sinitic Perspective. (s. 157)

Bžoch, A.: Anton Vydra: Hermés bez krídel. Kultúrne obrazy kontinentálnej hermeneutiky [Hermes without wings. Cultural images of continental hermeneutics]. (s. 159)

Janiec-Nyitrai, A.: Miloš Zelenka: Central Europe in Symbolic and Literary Geography. (s. 161)

Ružbaská, A.: Ivana Kupková: Cesty k „novej“ ruskej literatúre v slovenských prekladoch po roku 1989 [Paths to “new” Russian literature in Slovak translations after 1989]. (s. 164)