Professor Dora Vargha

I am a historian of medicine, science and technology, with expertise in the history of epidemics, the politics of health, and Cold War history. My 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. My research is informed by gender history, history of childhood and disability history, and is in conversation with medical anthropology, sociological approaches and political science.

I received my PhD in History from Rutgers University and before joining Exeter I was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and a postdoctoral fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. I am currently based jointly at the University of Exeter and Humboldt University in Berlin, and I have returned as a visiting researcher to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. I am co-editor of the book series Epidemic Histories at Johns Hopkins University Press and currently President of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health.

My interest spans from the politics of epidemic management to public health systems and access to therapeutics. My book, Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic was published open access in 2018 with Cambridge University Press. I have written on the global infrastructure of diphtheria antitoxin, the politics of vaccination in Eastern Europe, hospital care of disabled children in communist cotexts and about shifting epidemic narratives in historical analysis.

With colleagues from the University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh and Johns Hopkins University I have been working on the question of epidemic temporalities and what happens after disease ends. Placing epidemic narratives in focus, this project is an interdisciplinary collaboration to interrogate epidemic endings, think past the conventional narrative and neat epidemic bell-curves to identify, collect and disseminate different understandings of disease impacts.

Currently I am leading two, interconnected research projects exploring alternative approaches to the history of global health. Socialist Medicine: An Alternative Global Health History, funded by an ERC Starting Grant investigates the role of the socialist world in global health structures and networks, while the collaborative project funded by the Wellcome Trust, Connecting Three Worlds, together with Sarah Marks (Birkbeck) and Edna Suarez-Diaz (UNAM, Mexico) explores socialist networks in public health, technical assistance programs and mental health in the post-WWII era.

I am also co-Investigator on the 8-year interdisciplinary research project 'After the End: Lived experiences and aftermaths of diseases, disasters and drugs in global health', in collaboration with colleagues from Oxford University, University of Warwick, Liverpool John Moores University, University of Sierra Leone, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Anis Instituto de Bioética in Brazil.

My work has been awarded the 2020 Medical Humanities Award for Best International Research by the AHRC and Wellcome Trust, the 2019 Book Prize of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, the J. Worth Estes Prize by the American Association for the History of Medicine in 2016, and the Young Scholar Book Prize by the International Committee for the History of Technology in 2014.

I am open to discussing research proposals on a wide range of subjects given my research expertise. I am especially happy to consider working with candidates in the medical humanities; history of medicine, science and technology; Cold War history; history of internationalism; women and gender history; disability history; and the history of Eastern Europe.