Dr Justyna Aniceta Turkowska

Lecturer

Background

I studied history, sociology and political science at the Universities of Warsaw (Poland), Berlin and Hannover (Germany). I completed my PhD at the University of Giessen (Germany) in 2016. My PhD thesis on the transnational aspects of the history of medicine in the Eastern borderlands of the German Empire was awarded the Fritz Theodor Epstein Award of the Association of German Historians of Eastern Europe and the Scientific PhD Award of the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Berlin.

Before moving to Britain, I worked as a lecturer at in the University of Bonn at the Department of History of Medicine and at the University of Giessen (Germany) at the Department of Central and Eastern European History. I joined the University of Edinburgh as a DAAD-Lecturer in September 2018.

Responsibilities & affiliations

Edinburgh Centre for Global History

Undergraduate teaching

  • Historical Skills and Methods II [HIST10425]
  • Themes in Modern European History [HIST08043]
  • Making of the Modern World [HIST08033]
  • Mapping Nature, Territories and Cross-Cultural Encounter [HIST10447] (optional course)
  • The Geographies of Solidarity: Eastern Europe, Global South and Socialist Internationalism during the Cold War [HIST10448] (special subject)

Postgraduate teaching

  • Historical Research: Skills and Sources [PGHC11334]
  • Introduction to Contemporary History [PGHC11362]
  • Revolutions in Modern Europe [PGHC1143]
  • Madness, Science and Society in the Modern World   [PGHC11516]  

Research summary

Places: 

  • Europe

Themes: 

  • Comparative & Global History

Periods: 

  • Nineteenth Century
  • Twentieth Century & After

Research interests

My research focuses on the history of science and on global connections of (Eastern) Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, with an emphasis on German Empire and European-African entanglement history. 

My first book manuscript, Der kranke Rand des Reiches: Sozialhygiene und nationale Räume in der Provinz Posen um 1900 (The Grieving Edge of the Empire: Social Hygiene, Morality and Nation in the Province of Posen at the turn of the 19th century, published 2020), analyses medical discourses and biopolitical practices at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Eastern borderlands of the German Empire, particularly in the Prussian Province of Posen. It retraces how the introduction of medical institutions and public health was used by the German Empire to master and domesticate in a German manner its culturally, linguistically and nationally highly heterogeneous and therefore "troubling" eastern peripheries, what side-effects and hegemonic/national claim of power the medical mastery caused and how the themes of social hygiene were used to create a (medical) space of national belongings. 

Project activity

My current project, building methodologically on my previous work, analyses the transfer and circulation of technical geological expertise as well as the role of experts and their activities within the Global North-East-South solidarity ties and cooperation patterns in the 1960s-1980s.

By following the different European surveys teams and European -African geological cooperations by their attempts to (re-)map Ghana and Nigeria, the research project tells a story of how the geological theoretical and praxeological exchange looked like and how it was put into practice in a multi-cultural working environment. It thus examines geological production of changes through practices of interrelations and active material practices, and by doing so, shows how the globally conceived but locally situated new spatialisation and field-based redrawing of the portable knowledge of the experts reshaped the local, transnational and global epistemic context and the (new) transnational space of globalised expertise.

The list below is a subset of the information held on the University of Edinburgh PURE system, and includes Books, Chapters, Articles and Conference contributions. For a full list, including details of other publication types (e.g. reviews), please see the Edinburgh Research Explorer page for Dr Justyna Aniceta Turkowska.