The School of History at the University of Kent is pleased to offer a PhD scholarship, working alongside Professor Ulf Schmidt and Dr Stefan Goebel on Medical Memories and Experiences in East Germany, 1945-1961.
The scholarships cover fees in full at the Home/EU rate, as well as a maintenance bursary.
The School has established itself as one of the leading History departments within the UK. Recognised for its research excellence and quality teaching.
The Project:
While medicine and health stood at the heart of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), how can we examine, capture and understand the highly paradoxical and ambiguous nature of East German medicine? Some sixty years after having been founded, fifty years after the building of the Berlin Wall, and twenty-years after German unification, we still know relatively little about the traumatic memories and medical experiences of soldiers returning home from the battlefields, of women and children fleeing from destroyed cities, of broken communities and painful memories which made many all the more determined to construct a new, visionary society. By the late 1950s, the GDR had turned into a welfare dictatorship (Jarausch 1999) in which one of the most progressive health systems existed alongside medical paternalism, surveillance and repression, a society plagued by day-to-day intimidation and ethics violations, yet scholars have so far largely neglected this aspect of modern German history.
The successful candidate will have good background knowledge in modern German history and a keen interest in theories and methodologies in social, medical and cultural history.
The closing date for applications is 31 January 2013.
For further details of the programme and scholarships (including full terms, eligibility and application information), please visit: http://www.kent.ac.uk/history/o34/postgraduate/funding