Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc

At this launch event, Anna Toropova and Claire Shaw will introduce their new edited volume for Bloomsbury, Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. The book examines the variety of techniques developed in the socialist bloc to transform human psychophysiology, from the early days of the revolution to the collapse of state socialism. The volume’s eleven contributors from the UK, USA, and Central and Eastern Europe consider the ways in which science, culture and medicine overlapped with a mode of government that sought to cultivate and regulate all aspects of human life in the service of an ideological goal. They trace the role of scientists, medical professionals, educational specialists and cultural producers in articulating new ideas about the body, the mind, and human perfectibility. Finally, they explore some of the individual stories of those who transformed themselves, or who sought to transform others, as part of the wider Soviet ‘project’. The volume editors will be joined by a panel of respondents, including Sarah Marks (Birkbeck), Claudia Stein (Warwick) and Gareth Millward (SDU). The discussion will be followed by a wine reception.

Author bios

Anna Toropova is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Culture and the Mind at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on the interchanges between the psy-disciplines and mass culture in Russia and the Soviet Union. She is the author of Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre and the Politics of Affect under Stalin (Oxford UP, 2020). Her articles on Soviet cinema, culture and medicine have been published in Slavic Review, Russian Review, the Journal of Contemporary History and the Social History of Medicine.

Claire Shaw is Associate Professor in the History of Modern Russia at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on the history of disability, the senses and the body under Soviet socialism. She is the author of Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991 (Cornell, 2017), as well as articles in Urban History, Slavic Review, SEER and Zeithistorische Forschungen.