2025 Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Fellows Announced

My dissertation traces one of the earliest ventures of the Soviet medical internationalism after the Second World War: the Soviet Red Cross hospitals and their provision of medical service, materials, and knowledge in postcolonial and postwar North Korea from 1945 to 1965. With archival materials including Soviet Red Cross documents on their hospital operations and a variety of North Korean and Soviet magazines on public health, I conceptualize the nineteen hospitals as a locus of medical knowledge circulation and examine how the Soviet and North Korean doctors facilitated argument and discourse on socialist medicine and modern hygiene with public, which further transformed North Koreans’ everyday life in terms of public health, gender, and environment. As a global history of medicine project with analysis of gender and environment, my research shows how the Soviet medical internationalism did not entail the establishment of identical public health systems across the socialist states and in the Global South, but rather prompted the intersection of plural visions on modernity, medical practices, and conflicting interests of overlooked historical actors: not only both Soviet and North Korean medical practitioners, but also North Korean women and youth, who participated in mass public health campaigns and projects.  

My dissertation focuses on the development of an anti-imperialist discourse of the “East” in the Soviet Union and the Communist International (Comintern) in the interwar period. The “East” was defined as “the world of the oppressed nationalities [which includes] not only the peoples of Asia, but also of Africa, America (…the Negro population of the United States), etc.,” at the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in 1920. I contend that Bolsheviks in Central Asia and the North Caucasus perceived the unequal status of Russians and indigenous populations as a barrier to political and economic development, and that they developed a program of redistributing land to poor indigenous peasants, organizing peasants’ unions and councils, promoting literacy in Central Asian languages, recruiting Central Asian cadres, and materially addressing the legacy of “Great Russian chauvinism” in Central Asia. While this program was criticized and ultimately shut down by members of the central Bolshevik government, including Joseph Stalin, some of those who implemented it in Central Asia went on to found the Eastern Section of the Comintern, which attempted to apply this program in a variety of contexts including Algeria, the American South, Palestine, and South Africa. 

My dissertation takes elite artistic gymnastics as a lens to explore shifting understandings of gender, the body, and youth in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites during the Cold War. The Soviet Union dominated women’s artistic gymnastics for four decades, starting with its first appearance in 1952, even as the sport changed drastically. Gymnasts who embodied a mature, traditionally feminine ideal such as Věra Čáslavská and Larisa Latynina gave way in the 1970s to smaller adolescent—or pre-adolescent—girls such as Olga Korbut and Nadia Comăneci who were performing ever-more difficult acrobatic skills. Facing state pressure to keep bringing home medals in the intensifying “Olympic Cold War,” much older, usually male coaches and officials pushed their young charges to ever greater heights with little regard for their health and well-being. I situate this shift in an international sport world which facilitated both cross-cultural collaboration and competition, exacerbated intra-imperial rivalries within the Soviet sphere, and which had its own internal tensions regarding women’s participation. Ultimately, I aim to reveal how Soviet engagement with international sports culture, essentially a foreign policy project, intersected with intense domestic debates on how gendered bodies should look and act. 

This project explores the enduring struggles of rural life in Central Asia in the broader context of ecological and socio-economic transformations from the 1960s to the present. How did Soviet-era animal farms shape the region’s environment and society? What forms of animal husbandry have emerged in the market economy since the Soviet collapse? Above all, how have indigenous communities and the arid steppe ecology—its soil, climate, and non-human inhabitants— shaped both socialist and capitalist agrarian models? Through archival research, oral history, and ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Kazakhstan, I examine the environmental and social changes brought about by the practice of “intensive pastoralism” in collective farms between the 1960s and 1980s, as well as by the evolving animal farming practices since the Soviet collapse. These transformations include efforts to breed more productive species of merino sheep and other animals, the overgrazing and desertification of pastures, and the persistent decline of rural communities despite targeted infrastructure investment. Rather than framing these practices as a simple narrative of success or failure, I investigate the complexities of rural life and agrarian transformations, recognizing that success and failure meant different things to different living beings on the steppe.

My dissertation investigates the rise and enduring presence of Turkestanism, a political and cultural identity forged through a century-long interaction between Central Asia and its understudied diaspora. By adopting a bottom-up, transnational approach to Soviet nation-building in the twentieth century, the project offers an alternative lens to understanding the making of national identities in Central Asia. Given the scarcity of scholarship on this topic, the dissertation spans nearly a century, starting from the Bolshevik Revolution, which initiated the formation of the Turkestani diaspora, to the present day. Drawing on a diverse array of multilingual archival sources across Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. –as well as dozens of in-depth oral interviews with multiple generations of Turkestanis– the dissertation integrates the perspectives of both state and non-state actors. It argues that Turkestanism evolved in dialogue with Soviet nation-making in Central Asia while the geopolitical dynamics of WWII and the Cold War enabled the Turkestani diaspora to maintain its coherence across space and time. These geopolitical shifts allowed the diaspora to develop and extend non-state mechanisms for constructing and defending its national discourse in opposition to Soviet policies. Furthermore, the dissertation demonstrates the continued salience of this group for identity-making today. 

My dissertation explores the remaking of the eastern Black Sea region after the First World War through the prism of “Muslim Georgia,” a predominately Muslim borderland encompassing the Ajaran Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Ajara) and the neighboring province of Meskheti in Georgia, as well as the districts of Artvin and Ardahan in northeastern Turkey. Between 1918-21, this region was contested by multiple powers before it was divided between the nascent Soviet and Turkish states in 1921, becoming a contact zone of pragmatic cross-border cooperation and a site of persistent tensions between the Bolsheviks and Turkish nationalists. It was in this strategic corner of Transcaucasia where the Bolsheviks experimented with a unique form of autonomy for the Georgian Muslims of Ajara; where the local Soviet administration, fearful of Turkish influence, toggled between conciliatory policies and coercive modernization to build socialism; and where the interwar Soviet-Turkish alliance was forged and disintegrated. In tracing how a porous imperial borderland was transformed into a revolutionary showcase of socialism and later into a southern tier of the “Iron Curtain,” I illustrate how a borderland population with a long history of self-rule responded to the political and national projects of states competing for their allegiance.