Минали стипендианти

The research project focuses on the development of public health structures in the post-Ottoman realm. I envision a book with a working title, Dutiful Nurses: War, Public Health, and Gender in Southeast Europe (1878-1941), and a series of articles. This is a new research direction for me, which compares the establishment of public health systems in Bulgaria and Serbia, and more specifically the gradual professionalization of nursing in Southeast Europe. In both cases, condensed state-led modernization borrowed wholesale from European, Russian, and American public health and sanitary practices. I focus on the attendant processes of social stratification, labor diversification, and the construction of gendered national healthcare system. I suggest that wars and militarization of the modern post-Ottoman states were the triggering factors of opening new labor and civic opportunities to women of all classes. It was in the interwar period, though, when organizations such as the American Red Cross and the Rockefeller Foundation became more involved in Eastern Europe and contributed substantially to the reorganization of healthcare services. Thus, nursing serves as a window to explore larger issues of building nation states, expanding militarization, establishing capitalist economic order, and increasing social and political divisions.