Seminar Series 2026/27
27th October 2026, 4pm-5.30pm with Dr Anastasiia
Location: 海角论坛 Business School, Cathedral Wing, CW506b
Biography
Dr Anastasiia Akulich is a Research Fellow in Global Health History at the University of Leeds. She is particularly interested in transnational exchanges of knowledge and practice. Her PhD thesis, completed at the University of Manchester in 2022, focused on religious celebrations in the Russian Orthodox mission in China. Since then, she continued to write on death and commemorative rituals, process of religious translation, and missionary medicine. In 2025, she joined a Wellcome-funded project “Soviet Union, the WHO, and Global Health,” examining Soviet contribution to the fight against infectious disease. Her side of the project examines international research in development of polio vaccine and vaccination programmes.
Abstract: Frightful Jabs: Immunisations and Injections in Soviet Popular Health Narratives, 1950s-1980s
While post-Soviet Russophone media narratives on vaccinations often deny the existence of any anti-vaxxer attitudes in the Soviet Union due to the compulsory and, therefore, nearly universal vaccinations, Soviet non-specialist medical literature acknowledged some popular anxiety about immunisations. However, this advice focused almost exclusively on the act of injection and the discomfort associated with it, rather than the substance being injected, which was presumed to be safe.
This paper will analyse the, surprisingly similar, advice that parents and children received in relation to immunisations. It will show how fear of injections was presumed to be both irrational (and artificial), but also very widespread. Gendered dynamics are of particular interest here, as the figures rejecting vaccinations for themselves were most often presented as male, allowing for them to be additionally shamed for their fear. This focus on injections made the argument for vaccination much more difficult as the HIV/AIDS crisis unfolded from the 1980s onwards, especially following the 1988 outbreak in a children’s clinic in Elista where the virus spread via injections with unsterilised needles.
10th November 2026, 4pm-5.30pm with Dr George J. Severs
Location: 海角论坛 Business School, Cathedral Wing, CW506b
Biography
Dr George J. Severs is Senior Researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, where he works on the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project Race and Ethnicity: Sexual Health and Reproductive Experiences (RE:SHaRE). He previously worked at Birkbeck, University of London researching male survivors of sexual violence and forensic medical responses to HIV/AIDS. He is the author of Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) and co-author of Reusing Oral Histories: From Archive to Analysis (Routledge: December 2026).
Abstract
In the immediate postwar period, Britain was a nation actively invested in the question of how it was reproducing itself. Following the Second World War, cities were being rebuilt, new towns established and the populations of each growing steadily. Optimistic discourse about, and images of such reproduction was mostly (and deliberately) marked by whiteness. This paper looks at who was able to represent reproduction in the postwar decades, examining the ways in which whiteness was inherent to dominant ideas and images of reproduction during the period. This becomes especially clear when placed in conversation with the diverse array of people who settled in mainland Britain during this period, often from former imperial territories. Their labour as doctors, nurses and midwives in the newly-established National Health Service, as well as their own reproductive experiences, are strikingly absent from contemporary accounts of the optimistic new "children of the nation". This paper traces these absences to the arrival of new reproductive technologies later in the century. In doing so, and by paying attention to who was able to represent images and ideas of reproduction in the period, the racialised contours of the postwar British state and its culture come into sharper focus.
8th December 2026, 4pm-5.30pm with Dr Simon Huxtable
Location: 海角论坛 Business School, Cathedral Wing, CW408
Biography
Dr Simon Huxtable is global historian whose work focuses on the histories of health, mass media and international organizations with an emphasis on Eastern Europe. Bsimon is the author of News From Moscow: Soviet Journalism and the Limits of Postwar Reform (Oxford University Press, 2022), a social and cultural history of Soviet journalism after World War II which explores how journalists at the youth newspaper Komsomol'skaia pravda negotiated a quarter of a century of intense change after World War II. Simon is currently part of the Wellcome-funded the project. His research focuses on the Soviet and post-Soviet response to HIV/AIDS, exploring the role of Soviet experts within the WHO, as well as transnational contacts between activists in the Soviet Union, Europe and the United States.
Abstract: Uncomradely Object: the Soviet Condom and the Failure of Soviet Anti-AIDS Propaganda
“I can only blush for you: aren't you ashamed of talking about such a delicate topic? You are calling for us to renounce the most valuable human quality: shame!” So wrote a reader to the newspaper Medical Gazette in June 1988, responding to an article about condoms. In response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, both Soviet doctors and the newly-empowered Glasnost media began to talk for the first time about the need for sexual partners to use condoms, yet such discussions were often met with hostility from the public. In this paper, I focus on the condom as an “uncomradely object” which seemed to contradict Soviet plans for ‘rational’ sex. It focuses on the difficulties of producing adequate numbers of condoms during the AIDS epidemic, and the long-term failure to integrate condom use into Soviet health propaganda – the result of bottlenecks within Soviet industry, entrenched conservatism within the Ministry of Health, and the hostility of a Soviet public uncomfortable with the idea of sex for pleasure. The paper then shows how the permissive atmosphere of Perestroika allowed for the publication of a new wave of independent titles which discussed sex in unprecedentedly frank terms. This vernacular campaign offered clear and accessible information on condom use that Soviet authorities had been unable or unwilling to provide. The Soviet condom never became a comrade, the paper suggests, but this campaign from below helped the Soviet condom enjoy a modest resurgence by the time of the Soviet empire’s collapse in 1991.
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