Dora Vargha is Professor of History and Medical Humanities based jointly at the University of Exeter and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Between 2021 and 2024, she was a visiting fellow in the Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences research group, led by Lara Keuck. 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.
She currently leads two research groups: Connecting Three Worlds, a Wellcome Collaborative Award based at the University of Exeter which explores socialist networks in global health history, together with co-investigators Dr. Sarah Marks (Birkbeck) and Prof. Edna Suarez-Diaz (UNAM); and Socialist Medicine: An Alternative Global Health History, an ERC Starting Grant research group based at Humboldt Universität, which aims to move historical analysis beyond dichotomies of East/West and North/South in understanding the politics of scientific production and practice, challenging dominant spatial and geopolitical frameworks.
Her new project, After the End (Wellcome Discovery Award), critically addresses and dislocates narratives of disease and health. Working with an interdisciplinary team, she is exploring ways to think about stakes in biomedical research, medical practices and global health policies of unstable endings, finality and recurrence, forgetting, erasure and revisionism, and straightforward scripts of beginnings, crises and endings when it comes to disease.
Dora is co-editor of the Cambridge History of Medicine (6 volumes) and the Johns Hopkins University Press book series Epidemic Histories.
Projekte
Selected Publications
Vargha, Dora (2023). “Missing Pieces: Integrating the Socialist World in Global Health History.” History Compass 21 (7, Article e12779). https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12779.
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Vargha, Dora (2021). “Technical Assistance and Socialist International Health: Hungary, the WHO and the Korean War.” History and Technology 36 (3–4): 400–417. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1863623.
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Greene, Jeremy and Dora Vargha (2020). “‘Ends of Epidemics’ in COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation.” In COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation, ed. H. Brands and F. J. Gavin, 23–39. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/book.77593.
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Vargha, Dora (2020). “Reconsidering the Dramaturgy.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94 (4): 690–698. https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2020.0090.
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Past Events
Workshop
Health Beyond Medicine Workshop: Endings and After
MOREBook Launch
Canceled: (Cows, Toads, and Other) Technologies of Reproduction: A Double Book Launch & Film Screening
MORESeminar
Global Health on the Move
MOREInstitute's Colloquium
Patient Activism in the Public Sphere
MORESeminar
In Search of Biomedical Validity: Towards a Cross-Disciplinary History of Validation Practices
MOREInstitute's Colloquium
- Institute Event
Forensic Diplomacy and International Technical Cooperation: The Case of Mexico’s Extraordinary Mechanism for Forensic Identification
MORETalk
The Fetus and the Lamb: The Many Histories of the Auckland Antenatal Steroid Clinical Trial
MORETalk
Latrines, Vaccines, and Socialist Doctors: Health in Mozambique’s Weekly Magazine "O Tempo"
MORETalk
A Cosmopolitan Parasite: Tracking Toxoplasma Between Laboratory Diagnostics and Regionalized Public Health Measures
MOREInstitute's Colloquium
- Institute Event
Canceled: Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa at the Crossroads
MOREInstitute's Colloquium
- Institute Event
Debating “Scientific Warfare” in Republican China
MOREPresentations, Talks, & Teaching Activities
Conference of the ERC Nepostrans Project, Dedicated to the Memory of Emil Niederhauser and Istvan Deak. Budapest, Hungary
EAHMH, Oslo, Norway
EAHMH, Oslo, Norway
International conference held at Harnack Haus
Medical Humanities Workshop, Oxford University, UK
CENTRAL Workshop: Commodities, Trade, and Materiality in the Global Cold War, organised by The Research Centre for the History of Transformations (RECET), University of Vienna, Austria
University of Strasbourg, France
European Society for Social Science History Conference, Göteborg, Sweden
Oxford University Seminar in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
‘Gendered Knowledges in Times of Crisis’ Colloquium. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
Paper to be presented at the colloquium of the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen
Pre-Doctoral Research Seminar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Colloquium of the Institute and Museum of the History of Medicine, University of Zurich
ISCHE 34-SHCY-DHA “Internationalization in Education (18th-20th centuries)” conference, Geneva, Switzerland
10th Annual LSE-GWU-UCSB Cold War Graduate Conference, London, UK
Colloquium of the History Department at the University of Regensburg, Germany