Dr.
Bogdan Christian Iacob
BodganCristian.Iacob(at)oeaw.ac.at
Bogdan C. Iacob is post-doc researcher in the research unit Balkan Studies and member of the research project “Foreign Policy Thinking in Communist Albania and Romania” (PI-Idrit Idrizi) funded in whole by the FWF (Grant-DOI:10.55776/PAT6757023).
Brief Biography
Bogdan C. Iacob has a PhD from the History Department of the Central European University. He defended in June 2011 the dissertation Stalinism, Historians and the Nation. History-Production under Communism in Romania, 1955-1966 (summa cum laude and recipient of the “Best Dissertation Award” from CEU Doctoral Committee). He has been a fellow or research associate at universities or centres of advanced studies in Aarhus (2020-2019), Exeter (2019-2018), Budapest (2017-2015) Bucharest (2015-2014), Sofia (2014), Jena (2013), Maryland (College Park – 2007-2006), etc. He was a member of several international projects: “Lost in Transition: Social Sciences, Scenarios of Transformation, and Cognitive Dissonances in East Central Europe after 1989” (Centre for Advanced Studies in Sofia); “1989 After 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective” (University of Exeter); “Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections between the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds'” (an initiative comprising universities and institutes from the UK, USA, Germany, Hungary, and Serbia). He was principal investigator of the project “Turning Global: Socialist Experts during the Cold War (1960s-1980s)” (New Europe College). He also worked in multiple academic initiatives exploring: state socialist contributions to international law; youth politics in communist Romania; or, transnational circulations in policies of dealing with the past in Southeastern and Central Europe. He is associate editor for the book series Clio Medica (Brill) and member of the editorial boards of Isis. A Journal of the History of Science Society and the European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health.
Research interests
Period: 20th and 21st centuries
Area: Southeastern and Central Europe with a focus on Romania as well as international organizations.
Topics: the role of experts (historians or doctors) from Southeastern and Central Europe at UNESCO or WHO, and in post-colonial spaces. Other areas of research: Cold War studies; history of communism; memory and identity politics in post-socialism.
Selected Publications
- co-author with James Mark, Lubjica Spaskovska, and Tobias Rupprecht, 1989. A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2019).
- co-editor with Catherine Baker, Aniko Imre, and James Mark, Off White. Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race (Manchester UP, 2024).
- Malariology and Decolonization: Eastern European Experts from the League of Nations to the World Health Organization, Journal of Global History, 11/2 (2022), 233-253.
- Health in Socialism Goes Global. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonization. Edited by James Mark and Paul Betts. Oxford UP. 2022. 254-286.
- Southeast by Global South: Balkans, UNESCO and the Cold War in Alternative Globalizations. Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World. Edited by James Mark, Artemy Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung. Indiana UP. 2020. 251-271.