Dora Vargha
Dora Vargha is Professor of History and Medical Humanities, based jointly at Humboldt University and the University of Exeter. She is currently Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. She is a historian of medicine, science and technology, with expertise in the history of epidemics, the politics of health, and Cold War history. Her work focuses on questions of global health and biomedical research in the Cold War era, using the locality of Eastern Europe as a starting point.
Her interest spans from the politics of epidemic management to public health systems and access to therapeutics. Dora’s monograph, Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic was published open access in 2018 with Cambridge University Press and has received multiple awards. She has written on the global infrastructure of diphtheria antitoxin, the politics of vaccination in Eastern Europe, hospital care of disabled children in communist contexts and about shifting epidemic narratives in historical analysis and the endings of disease. Apart from this project, Dora is leading on a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award ‘Connecting Three Worlds’ and is co-investigator in the Wellcome Discovery Award ‘After the End’ starting in 2023.
Dora’s research in this project investigates how state socialist countries engaged with Western and non-aligned health systems, international organizations and global health programs. The enquiry explores hitherto ignored perspectives of international agencies and foregrounds the formation of socialist internationalism in health. She studies the role of governmental actors, international organizations, institutions and the scientific community in establishing competing and intersecting international networks. She asks in what ways the socialist world contributed to international health in formative years of the Cold War; what role alternative networks and diplomatic relations played in the way international and global health developed in the second half of the 20th century and if we can understand socialist health as a rhetorical term that emerges from Cold War competition, alongside socialist health as a distinct set of practices and concepts.
To understand and integrate alternative internationalisms into global health narratives, Dora’s research explores socialist medicine on multiple registers, connecting personal experiences, healthcare provision, national guidelines and policies and international practices. From an Eastern European perspective, drawing on Hungarian and East German case studies, she examines solidarity projects, exchanges of scientists, patients and technologies, negotiations of various healthcare models and conceptual underpinnings of international networks.
Key publications
Missing Pieces: Integrating the Socialist World in Global Health History. History Compass, History Compass, e12779 (2023). Open Access at https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12779
Where is the end and what comes after? The Pandemic and History, AHRLab. American Historical Review, Vol 127, no. 3. September 2022. 1373-1378.
“1959 A Sabin-cseppek bevezetése Magyarországon” in Ferenc Laczó and Bálint Varga eds. Magyarország Globális Története. Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 2022 [in Hungarian]
“Technical Assistance and Socialist International Health: Hungary, the WHO, and the Korean War” History and Technology Vol 36 no. 3-4, 2020. 400-417.
“The Socialist World in Global Polio Eradication”. Revue d-Études Comparatives Est-Ouest (RECEO), Vol 49, No.1, 2018
Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary’s Cold War with an Epidemic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Global Health Histories Series, 2018. Open Access.
“Socialist Utopia in Practice: Everyday Life and Medical Authority in a Hungarian Polio Hospital. Social History of Medicine, Volume 31, Issue 2, 1 May 2018
“Vaccination and the communist state: polio in Eastern Europe” in Stuart Blume, Peter Greenough and Christine Holmberg eds. The Politics of Vaccination: A Global History, Studies for the Society of the Social History of Medicine. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2017
Ana Antic, Johanna Conterio and Dora Vargha, “Beyond Liberal Internationalism” Journal of Contemporary European History, vol. 25, Part 2, May 2016
Dora Vargha
Dora Vargha is Professor of History and Medical Humanities, based jointly at Humboldt University and the University of Exeter. She is currently Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. She is a historian of medicine, science and technology, with expertise in the history of epidemics, the politics of health, and Cold War history. Her work focuses on questions of global health and biomedical research in the Cold War era, using the locality of Eastern Europe as a starting point.
Her interest spans from the politics of epidemic management to public health systems and access to therapeutics. Dora’s monograph, Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic was published open access in 2018 with Cambridge University Press and has received multiple awards. She has written on the global infrastructure of diphtheria antitoxin, the politics of vaccination in Eastern Europe, hospital care of disabled children in communist contexts and about shifting epidemic narratives in historical analysis and the endings of disease. Apart from this project, Dora is leading on a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award ‘Connecting Three Worlds’ and is co-investigator in the Wellcome Discovery Award ‘After the End’ starting in 2023.
Dora’s research in this project investigates how state socialist countries engaged with Western and non-aligned health systems, international organizations and global health programs. The enquiry explores hitherto ignored perspectives of international agencies and foregrounds the formation of socialist internationalism in health. She studies the role of governmental actors, international organizations, institutions and the scientific community in establishing competing and intersecting international networks. She asks in what ways the socialist world contributed to international health in formative years of the Cold War; what role alternative networks and diplomatic relations played in the way international and global health developed in the second half of the 20th century and if we can understand socialist health as a rhetorical term that emerges from Cold War competition, alongside socialist health as a distinct set of practices and concepts.
To understand and integrate alternative internationalisms into global health narratives, Dora’s research explores socialist medicine on multiple registers, connecting personal experiences, healthcare provision, national guidelines and policies and international practices. From an Eastern European perspective, drawing on Hungarian and East German case studies, she examines solidarity projects, exchanges of scientists, patients and technologies, negotiations of various healthcare models and conceptual underpinnings of international networks.
Key publications
Missing Pieces: Integrating the Socialist World in Global Health History. History Compass, History Compass, e12779 (2023). Open Access at https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12779
Where is the end and what comes after? The Pandemic and History, AHRLab. American Historical Review, Vol 127, no. 3. September 2022. 1373-1378.
“1959 A Sabin-cseppek bevezetése Magyarországon” in Ferenc Laczó and Bálint Varga eds. Magyarország Globális Története. Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 2022 [in Hungarian]
“Technical Assistance and Socialist International Health: Hungary, the WHO, and the Korean War” History and Technology Vol 36 no. 3-4, 2020. 400-417.
“The Socialist World in Global Polio Eradication”. Revue d-Études Comparatives Est-Ouest (RECEO), Vol 49, No.1, 2018
Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary’s Cold War with an Epidemic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Global Health Histories Series, 2018. Open Access.
“Socialist Utopia in Practice: Everyday Life and Medical Authority in a Hungarian Polio Hospital. Social History of Medicine, Volume 31, Issue 2, 1 May 2018
“Vaccination and the communist state: polio in Eastern Europe” in Stuart Blume, Peter Greenough and Christine Holmberg eds. The Politics of Vaccination: A Global History, Studies for the Society of the Social History of Medicine. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2017
Ana Antic, Johanna Conterio and Dora Vargha, “Beyond Liberal Internationalism” Journal of Contemporary European History, vol. 25, Part 2, May 2016
