Guest host Isabelle Avakumovic-Pointon talks with Dr. Maria Bucur, Dr. Frances Bernstein, Dr. Maria Cristina Galmarini, and Dr. Magdalena Zdrodowska about the history of disability in Eastern Europe.
Episode image: A disabled Soviet veteran with no legs sits in a wheelchair that rolls several inches above the ground. He sits on a street curb surrounded by standing military personnel on his right hand side. A small crowd of children stand to his right and look down at him.
Download show notes (compiled by Isabelle Avakumovic-Pointon) here.
About our Guests
Dr. Maria Bucur is Professor of Gender Studies and History at Indiana University in the USA. She has published extensively on gender, eugenic, medicine, and disability in interwar and state socialist Romania. Professor Bucur’s first book, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania, was published in 2002. Her current research project focuses on developing a platform for the study of the history of disabilities in Eastern Europe.
Dr. Frances Bernstein is Associate Professor of History at Drew University in New Jersey, USA. the mid-twentieth century. Her research focuses on disability, gender, sexuality, medicine, and the body in the Soviet context. Professor Bernstein’s first book, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses was published in 2007. Her current book project is titled City of Broken Men: Disability, Memory, and Masculinity at the End of World War Two.
Dr. Maria Cristina Galmarini is Associate Professor of History and Global Studies at William & Mary University in Virginia, USA. Her research focuses on social rights for marginalized groups, especially people with disabilities, in the early Soviet Union. Professor Galmarini’s first book, The Right to Be Helped: Entitlement, Deviance, and the Soviet Moral Order, was published in 2016 by Northern Illinois University Press. She has an upcoming book, titled Ambassadors of Social Progress A History of International Blind Activism in the Cold War, which will be published in Winter 2023.
Dr. Magdalena Zdrodowska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Audiovisual Art at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Her research focuses on the history of Deafness, disability, media, and technology. Professor Zdrodowska’s latest book is titled Telephones, cyborgs, and cinema: Entangled relations between deafness and technology and was published in Polish in 2021. Her current research project is titled The Deaf History of Cinema. Professor Zdrodowska is also an advocate for disability studies in Poland, and she is the Chair of the Disability Studies in Eastern Europe-Reconfigurations research platform.
