Project Events

The workshop aimed to put interdisciplinarity at its heart, bringing together social historians, historians of science and medicine, film studies scholars, cultural studies scholars, and literary scholars. It also sought to strengthen collaborative research networks between Warwick and leading centres for medical humanities research in the UK (Centre for the History of Healthcare, Strathclyde; Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health) and in Europe (Centre for Culture and the Mind, Copenhagen, and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich). The workshop brought together thirty delegates from Denmark, Georgia, Germany, Uzbekistan, and UK universities to explore scientific, medical, and cultural approaches to psychological trauma in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The speakers and chairs were joined by postgraduate students from the Faculty of Arts.

The workshop opened with a keynote by Prof. Polly Jones from Oxford. It examined why Stalinist terror and the Gulag aren't recognised as ‘cultural trauma’ in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, unlike in places such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The lecture explored how trauma is obscured within Soviet and Putin-era memory politics and sparked a discussion about ‘objective trauma,’ ‘cultural trauma,’ and the translation of medical concepts into popular culture.

The first panel examined the effects of trauma on vulnerable groups. Panellists presented case studies of homeless children in early Soviet Moscow, women in besieged Leningrad, and older adults in Soviet care homes. The papers prompted participants to debate the extent to which ‘traumatisation’ was viewed as a problem of individual personality. The second panel examined psychiatric framings of trauma in Eastern Europe. Papers on juvenile delinquency in Socialist Slovenia, psychedelic therapies for trauma in Czechoslovakia, and the legacy of Alexander Luria’s 1947 book Traumatic Aphasia sparked discussion about whether trauma is culturally constructed. The third panel embraced interdisciplinarity. Papers on the representation of violence, madness, and trauma in the literature and film of the 1920s-1940s stimulated discussion of the interactions between medicine and culture and of how trauma can be expressed and understood.

The second day began with an interdisciplinary panel examining ‘Trauma Culture.’ Papers on late-Soviet nonconformist photography, post-Soviet Azerbaijani cinema, and a recent modern art exhibition illuminated the (anti-)colonial legacies of Russia and invited participants to discuss approaches to researching trauma at the periphery of the Soviet empire. The final panel of the workshop addressed medical languages and personal narratives of trauma. Panellists presented case studies on the medical treatment of trauma and traumatic neurosis, as well as on the introspection of trauma in diaries in the first half of the twentieth century. The discussion examined the significance of locus in conceptualising trauma and reflected on Ukraine's contemporary research culture.

The workshop provided a platform for exchange across medical, historical, and cultural research. It facilitated the development of new research networks focused on exploring and representing trauma in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

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