Victoria Shmidt FWF

RACE SCIENCE: UNDISCOVERED POWER OF BUILDING THE NATIONS

CONTENT PP.

Project description 2
1 Introduction and state of art 2
1.1 The call for revising the legacy of race science in contemporary intellectual history 2
1.2 The history of race science in CEE countries: Missed methodological challenges 3
2. Objectives and overview 4
3. Research methodology and approach 5
3.1.The strategies of gathering data 5
3.2 Reconstructing the pathways of race science in CEE countries 7
3.3.Connecting the past and the presence: Segregation as ongoing implication
of race science 9
4. Innovative aspects and the potential input for the host institute
(Southeast European History and Anthropology, University of Graz) 10
5. Importance of the expected results for the discipline 11
6. Organizational framework of the project 12
6.1. Strategies for dissemination of results 12
6.2. Strategies of communication of results 13
6.3.Work plan and project schedule 14
7. Research site: Quality of the supervision and
of the integration in the team/institution 17
8. Ethical considerations 18
Bibliography 19
CV of main applicant, Victoria Shmidt 22
List of publications of main applicant 25
CV of co-applicant. Karl Kaser 27
List of publications of co-applicant 29

1
Victoria Shmidt FWF

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
1 Introduction and state of art
1.1 The call for revising the legacy of race science in contemporary intellectual history
Although historians often mention that race science survived after 1945, there are only a few
explanations of contemporary reproduction of the post-national ‘regional national-socialism’ as closely
interrelated with the history of race science (Spektorowski 2016). Reading race science as actively
communicating with the other realms of producing racism emphasizes the role of transitions between
science and public discourses. The close link between race science and segregation leads to
inseparability of evolutionary theories and political claims (Stone 2016) inevitably limiting the options
of recognizing the epistemological trends of diverse periods of nation-building in diverse regions as
resonating with the formation of race science (Kühl 2002). Those who face the risk of taking race science
out of history emphasize it as decapitalizing and detemporalizing, leading to locating race science
beyond the reach of change (Hall 1997).
The call for contextualizing race science reverberates with the rising trend of indicating the core
role of raciology in the origin of “all social sciences” (Winant 2015). The task of elaborating the negation
of racial roots in social sciences that effectively “attacks a pre-existing entity in order to transform some
thing or state and indicate causal determination of the inappropriate operation of science” (Collier 1994:
192) started to be one of the most demandable for contemporary intellectual history. In turn, bringing
into analytical focus the pervasiveness of racial thinking amongst scholars re-delineates the previously
established frontiers of theorizing racism. Recently, increased interest in recapitulation theory and racial
assimilationism as coterminous with overt racial theories determined revisiting the theoretical grounds
of educational psychology, childhood studies, and cultural anthropology (Fallace 2012; Koops 2015;
Lipphardt and Widmer 2016; Redman 2016).
Also, involving a wider range of scientific knowledge in revisiting race science orchestrates the
replacement of previously disseminated notions such as “scientific racism” or “pseudo-science” within
the margins of critical deconstruction because not only of their over-politicizing but due to perpetuation
of overused dichotomies that portrayed race science in mutually opposing terms. While race science
aimed to provide scientific argument for establishing and practicing the hierarchies of population
subgroups in favour of reinforcing nations’ homogeneity, this mission started to grouping different
camps of racially minded scholars and shaped the diversity of methodological pathways. The contest
among them dovetailed with intensive formation of inter-country alliances and even more the global
agenda of various realms of scientific knowledge. Producing theoretical methods targeted with the
priorities of nation-building accompanied intensive institutionalization of academia: scientific centers,
schools, particular networks of scholars appeared and started to be embedded into various realms of
public life. Recognizing the long-term impact of this institutional pathway of many sciences as launched
by racial thinking calls for revisiting previous waves of critical deconstruction of race science from the
point of discursive analysis.

2
Victoria Shmidt FWF

1.2 The history of race science in CEE countries: Missed methodological challenges
By concluding one of the first attempts to provide a comparative overview of race science in
CEE countries, M. Bucur, among others, stresses three interrelated preconditions for mapping the
historiography of modernization and state-building through health, hygiene and eugenics: 1) bringing
together the two perspectives, post-imperial and post-colonial, for recognizing the ambivalence of
eugenics’ intentions; 2) focusing on the interrelation between claims and actions, especially in the
comparative meaning; and 3) achieving a more consistent intersectionality in interpreting the outputs of
racial thinking and political strategies (Bucur 2011: 441). Challenges aside, these preconditions call for
crossing temporal, spatial and ideological borders in recognizing the legacy of race science.
In CEE countries, redefining the role of race science is accompanied by specific historical
predicaments. Being only partially acceptable, the history of race science in this region is often imposed
by the impact of authoritarian regimes, both Nazi and Soviet, while other driving forces such as the
specifics of post-colonial and post-imperial past remain undeservedly marginalized. The very unanimity
of the view on the role of eugenics and racial anthropology in CEE countries as opposed to their
apotheosis in Germany (Ziherl et all 2007; Šimůnek 2015) strives not only to defining race science as
insignificant (Mircheva 2008) (excluding some studies concerning the impact of racial ideas on the
Ustasha policies (Yeomans 2013) but not racist or even more coherently humanistic (Musíl 2014;
Stojanovic 2015). The positive image of race science is embedded in lionizing its performance as part
of the political resistance to the pressure of Soviet pseudo-scientific flows, such as Lysenkoism
(Šimůnek and Hoßfeld 2011). In contrast to the recent trend of revising the role of recapitulation theory
and racial assimilationism as the core theoretical pathways to reproducing race science after 1945 in the
West, the contemporary history of race science in CEE countries overlooks many of the theories
employed by racially minded scholars, ideologues and theorists for legitimizing the different realms of
nationalist politics. Along with aggravating the risk of blurring the boundaries between race science and
its possible implications, the limited range of racial ideas establishes artificial ruptures in the history of
race science and its interrogation in nation-building. The interplay of race science and the policies
concerning ethnic minorities is relegated to the margins of attention of local experts. For instance, the
oscillations between interwar eugenics and socialist genetics are missed despite the obvious role of
former Czech eugenicists in legalizing sterilization in the second half of the 1960s.
Along with simplistic politicized approaches to negate the legacy of race science, some scholars
devised counter-narratives immediately offering an alternative way of historicizing race science in CEE
countries. Despite the obvious variety of approaches, they utilize a comparable set of historiographic
tools to juxtapose the revision of nation-building and the rearrangement of continuities in the
performance of race science: extending the timeline of race science and recognizing its affinity with
international trends, and embedding it into wider political contexts. By sharing the view on race as a
symbolic meaning system, N. Bartulin (2014) traces the more than one-hundred-year-long history of

3
Victoria Shmidt FWF

adopting, legitimizing, and reproducing racialist thinking itself across generations of Croatian scholars.
Largely, the framework of his analysis can be compared to historicizing the formation of whiteness
representing “the conceptual machineries of universe-maintenance” relative to race (Guess 2006). A.
Cergol (2009; 2014), Ž. Dugac (2010; 2015), M. Kuhar and S. Fatović-Ferenčić (2012, 2015), L.
Pantović (2013), and Ch. Promitzer (2007) aimed to map the position of racially minded scholars
amongst political elites and their struggle for power. Such a claim embeds the biographies of scholars
in two interrelated contexts, the continuity between different political periods (also different due to the
dynamic of the elites’ struggle) and the increased intersectionality of the agenda of race science as an
outcome of political pressure from different elites. The very recent research by R. McMahon (2016)
aims to re-evaluate the impact of racial theories in constructing national identities – this focus
leads the author to recognize the transnational origin of racialist thinking and the multilevel process
of adopting and disseminating the knowledge about races. By profiling the narratives about eugenics
in CEE countries towards embedding it into global history of ideas, M. Turda obviously leaves enough
space for further investigations towards better understanding of the role of CEE sciences in nation-
building and the elaboration of race science as well (Turda 2015).

2. Objectives and overview

This project analyses the reproduction of race science in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and
Yugoslavia - the countries where nationalism developed from being peripheral to becoming unified.
Sharing the colonial past, these countries could not avoid reproducing the model of a dual society and
the infiltration of diverse realms of public life by the patterns of internal colonialism during the interwar
period. Obviously, these policies echoed in the post-1945 strategies concerning ethnic minorities
including the Roma – one of the most disenfranchised groups in each of these countries. Experiencing
diverse pathways of nation-building because of different contexts of transferring from peripheral
nationalism to state-building nationalism, the status regarding Nazi Germany, the role of the Soviet
influence, and the current Europeanisation, these countries also vary in their modes of mutual
interrogation of race science and nation-building. These variations shape the wide ranging pathways of
transferring ideas, practices and policies in favor of legitimizing race science and its actors – racially
thinking scholars.
The promising comparability of the Bulgarian, Czech and Yugoslav cases both in terms of
resemblance and difference in the role of race science reverberates with the very palpable history of
inter-country cooperation of the theorists of nation-building. Undoubtedly, the involvement of the Czech
archaeologists and historians (L. Niederle, K. Jireček) into the studies aimed at revising the origin of
Bulgarians and Yugoslavs between the 1890s and 1910s should be seen as a kind of initial points of this
cooperation. During the interwar period, the inter-country cooperation among anthropologists deepened
the argument in favor of healthy hybridization as the core pathway of building the Slav nations and faced
the call to oppose Racial Hygiene and overt racism. Also, the history of the cooperation between

4
Victoria Shmidt FWF

racially minded scholars remained to be in the shadow of multiple shortcoming in exploring the
interrogation between race science and nation-building such as the fact of disparting the trajectories of
race science during the World War II and after 1945. This project sheds light on the networking amongst
racially minded scholars from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia as a complex transnational
setting, which ensured the reproduction of race science in discursive practices shaping nationalistic
politics during the twentieth century.

3. Research methodology and approach

3.1.The strategies of gathering data
In order to exam the mutual affinity of race science in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and
Yugoslavia, I juxtapose institutional discourse analysis and biographical method. I am interested both
in the formal (institutionalized projects) and the informal (research groups without particular
institutional affiliation, e.g. Croatian group Praxis that revised the Soviet modifications to the
recapitulation theory) intellectual homes of racial science. Thus, the main method of gathering data is
the studies at the universities archives and the archives of the Academies of Sciences. I successfully
applied this strategy for gathering data in the Bulgarian, Czech and Slovak archives, and I intend to use
the same strategy in Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia. I examine the agendas and reports of the research
groups, institutions, and particular departments in order to evaluate the magnitude and continuity of each
of the theories and reconstruct their institutional career at inter-country level. I focus on the personal
profiles of scholars, their texts, and informal communication with colleagues within the country and
abroad. Special attention is paid to the biographies of scholars who were prominent figures in developing
race science and internationally acknowledged experts who actively operated during the interwar and
post-war periods. They not only produced the main ideas, obtained top-positions relevant for intensive
elaboration and dissemination of race science but also played a key role in connecting different cohorts
of racially thinking scientists and relevant epistemic communities in different countries within and
beyond the region. Mainly but not only the project focuses on following scholars: in Bulgaria on Milko
Balan (1888-1973), Nikola Saranov (1895-1974), Asen Ivanov Hadžiolov (1903-1994), Dragomir
Mateev (1902-1971), Peter Boev (1920 – 1994), Naiden Shaitanov (1890-1970); in Czechoslovakia
Jaroslav Suchý (1926-1975), Alojz Chura (1899–1979),Vojtěch Suk (1879-1967), Helena Malá (1935-
2013), Emanuel Vlček (1925-2006), Milan Dokládal (1928- 2004) and Vojtěch Fetter (1905-1971); in
Yugoslavia Vladimir Stanojević (1886-1978), Avgust Munda (1886-1971), Božo Škerlj (1908-1961),
Vladimir Dvorniković (1888 – 1956), Andrija Štampar (1888 –1958), Zoran Bujas (1910-2003).
The inter-country setting of race science was not shaped exclusively by endemic cultures and
the politics of exploitation. Two mutually resonating assemblages of colonialism: internal, determined
by ethnic hierarchies within the Bulgarian, Czechoslovak and Yugoslav nations, and external, stemmed
from the expectations and prescriptions of international organizations, framing the trajectories of race
science and its implications. Thus, I focus on the international experts and scientific centres that

5
Victoria Shmidt FWF

energized inter-country collaboration and dissemination of particular ideas. I have already conducted
the archival survey at German archives in order to recognize the role of those German anthropologists
who elaborated evolutionist conception of human development in terms of hybridization and isolation:
Eugen Fischer (1874-1967), Karl Saller (1902-1969) and Ilse Schwidetzky (1907-1997), and who were
in long-term cooperation with CEE scholars over the twentieth century. This cooperation directly
shaped the post-war agenda of anthropological surveys in CEE countries and encouraged the operation
of CEE race science at international level. Also, I need to deepen the knowledge about the role of CEE
countries in international agenda of race science and the impact of international settings of racially
minded scholars. The primary mapping of the history of collaboration between CEE and the Western
scholars from other countries inclined to conduct the study at the archives of Danish Institute for Human
Genetics and Eugenics, Copenhagen; Uppsala University Archive, Statens institut för rasbiologi and
National Archive, Stockholm in order to recognize the impact of Swedish post-1945 surveys among
ethnic minorities and direct cooperation between socialist scholars with Swedish geneticists and
anthropologists; Foundations of British Sociology: The Sociological Review Archive, (Keele) (with
focus on the figure of Scottish sociologist Alexander Farquharson who intensively collaborated with the
governments of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia during the interwar period and was employed
for field research in the countries’ periphery); Royal College of Surgeons Archive, London (with
particular focus on the figure of Sir Arthur Keith who directly supported and promoted the outcomes of
the surveys conducted by the Czech anthropologists); archive of Julian Huxley and archive of UNESCO
(Paris) for recognizing the impact of the socialist scholars on elaborating the agenda of post-war race
science.
Along with exploring the interrelation between national and international levels of race science,
I examine its recognizability for mass audience as the main outcome and prerequisite of its operation as
a powerful tool of gender-based surveillance. I explore the narratives concerning the nation, its health,
and the limits of minorities as the main products of race science brought into action by diverse campaigns
targeted at practicing surveillance over those who were accepted as at risk of being unfit - women. I
bring together academic texts (articles, expert reports, and policy papers) and popular texts (outreaching
films, publications by scholars for popular magazines especially for women, broadcasting) as an
intersecting gender, disability, and ethnicity into powerful analogies between children, savages, women,
minorities, disabled, and animals. I explore the inter-country career of these analogies operating as
specific moralized behavioral scripts in the policies aimed at recruiting the population into new
reproductive behavior, regulating the involvement of women in the labor market, establishing
surveillance over the minorities, and preventing infectious and inherited diseases. For these purposes, I
collect data from the National Film Archives and National libraries in Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia.
During my previous archival studies, I indicated the close cooperation between the Czech and Serbian
filmmakers within the production of outreaching movies targeted with prevention of infectious diseases
between the 1920 and 1930s: some films, e.g. Osudná chvíle (Fortuitous Moment, 1935 by Václav

6
Victoria Shmidt FWF

Kubásek and Josef Kokeisl), about venereal diseases were produced by inter-country teams and made
in two countries. I am going to collect more information about the transfer of narrative practices and
other tools used for producing impressive outreaching films.
These three main dimensions for collecting the data will provide the grounds for rigorous
historical survey aimed at revisiting the time-line of race science and recognize its longue durée.

3.2 Reconstructing the pathways of race science in CEE countries

Reconstructing the field and the method of race science, its continuity and particularity, is
explored as an ongoing process of interrogating with the most urgent calls from those who practiced
nation-building: authorities, political movements, and international organizations. I redefine the timeline
of race science elaboration in line with Bhabha’s distinction of the nationalism’s aspects (Bhabha
1990:139-170), two interrelated tasks: 1) emancipation from colonial/authoritative past and
reestablishing the homogeneity of the nations; 2) legitimation of internal colonialism concerning
periphery and enacting structural violence against ethnic minorities. The first task, emancipation of the
nation, directly linked race science with mastering the “bad” past and resistance to extraneous pressure,
into the continuity of three periods: 1) emancipation from the colonial past (between the 1900s and
1920s); 2) negating affiliation with the Nazi regime and its Racial Hygiene (between the 1930s and
1950s); 3) resistance to the pressure of Soviet science (including Lysenkoism, simplistic
conceptualization of Slavdom in CarpatoBalkanika project between 1957 and 1992, psycho-
educational theories focusing on social factors). Even after 1990, this realm faced a new challenge -
pressure of Europeanization reverberating with dissolution of the states. Intensive employment of the
whole range of racial theories by diverse nationalistic movements reflects the historical continuity of
race science in this region.
The second task, ruling the periphery and practicing surveillance over minorities, builds the
history of race science with its corollary, reproductive policy. Although Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia varied in their strategies towards regulating reproduction, it is reasonable to indicate two
main periods concerning the role of race science: 1) the period of debates amongst racial scholars
concerning desirable reproductive policies (between 1910s and 1930s); 2) the period of applying race
science to the transformation of demographic policy (between the 1940s and 1980s). Juxtaposing these
two timelines of race science aims to fill the interpretative lacunae in recognizing the epistemological
mechanisms that dictated the subjugating of race science to nation-building – within different political
regimes across the countries and over the twentieth century.
I explore the elaboration of race science as a process of layering and conversion of the
approaches brought into action by different cohorts of scholars in order to face the changes in the
priorities of nation-building. The three realms of race science, recapitulation theory, racial
assimilationism, and Slavdom theory, are examined as the principal theoretical pathways for long-term
institutionalizing race science. Eugenics and physical/biological anthropology remain the main

7
Victoria Shmidt FWF

organizational frameworks for practicing these theories. The interrelation between these two
institutionalized branches of race science in the region reflected the employment of race science by the
state within the aims of nation-building. In line with the interlocutory outcomes, I recognize the
continuity of three chronotopes, specific verbal-ideological belief systems, which organized the intra-
and inter-country operation of race science:
 the appearance of race science as an agent of liberation between the 1890s and 1920s;
 the primary institutionalization of race science as a structure of statehood between the
1920s and 1940s;
 employing race science by national and supranational agents for practicing surveillance
over the population (between the 1940s and 1980s).
The continuity of these chronotopes frames the narrative for planned monograph preliminary
entitled “Race science in CEE countries: Undiscovered Power of Building the Nations”.
Being one of the agents of liberation between the 1890s and 1920s, race science participated in
shaping the nations. Race science appeared between the 1890s and 1990s, during the period of liminality
of Czech nationalism, when the potential of the pedagogical realm of the nationalistic movements was
exhausted, but the performance of ‘the carnivalesque aspects of nation-building: in rebellions, protest
marches, sporting events, and in universal adult franchise’ (Chakrabarty 2000) remained limited. During
this period, several mutually related and internationally operating flows, stressing the mission of
acceleration for emancipating the nations and exploiting recapitulation theory (e.g. F. Čáda, B. Zarnik,
S. Vatev), focused on hybridization as the core pathway of shaping Slavic nations within racial
assimilationism (e.g. J. Matiegka, M. Popov, F. Derganz), and rejecting the Slav origin of the nation (K.
Pašev, S. Konsulov, F. Ivaniček) etched the main pathways for elaborating race science. Eugenics and
physical anthropology remained closely linked realms of producing racial thinking. Tellingly, the
negative eugenic measures were discussed mainly concerning the core nation as one of the indispensable
measures for improvement. This chronotope would be explored in the part 1 of planned monograph,
“Race science as an agent of emancipation: Shaping the nations (1890s-1920s)”.
During the period of practicing statehood (between the 1920s and 1940s), the Bulgarian,
Czechoslovak, and Yugoslav race sciences faced the crisis of its legitimacy in solving the task of
national homogenization and the involvement into practicing internal colonialism started to operate as
a space for reinforcing the reputation of racially minded scholars. One of the main vehicles for practicing
internal colonialism, elaborating public health, employed many scholars into intensive cooperation with
international organizations such as Rockefeller Foundation or League of Nations. Participating in the
international initiatives advanced the academic status of scholars and institutions, and obviously
reverberated with the national priorities in mastering the periphery. Also, participation in producing
internal colonialism remapped the academic camps both at national and international levels, provoking
a wide range of debates between these camps. Massive split between anthropologists and eugenicists by
the end of the 1930s will be explored as one of the main outcomes of this process. I explore the second

8
Victoria Shmidt FWF

chronotope in the part 2 of the monograph, “Race science as a structure of internal colonialism:
Practicing statehood (1920s-1940s)”.
I interpret multifaceted profile of post-1945 enlightened racial thinking as shaped by the
interwar experience of mutual negation and re-integration of academic communities. The transfer of
eugenics into genetics and infiltrating anthropology by demographic studies operate as the main
institutionalized pathways of race science during the post-war period. The involvement of race science
into the task of supervising the reproduction of populations between the 1940s and 1980s provided a
wide range of implications concerning, for example, the healthy mode of life (the prevention of inherited
diseases, longevity, healthy parenthood) and surveillance over the reproduction of unfit population
(people with disabilities and ethnic minorities). Along with tracing the intra- and inter-country pathways
of race science, I focus on the multiple involvement of racially minded scholars into international
projects such as the Human Adaptability Program, continued in the 1960s as the International Biological
Programme, HAP-IBP, several projects supported by World Health Organization and aimed at
disseminating new standards of care for infants, and totally academic initiatives targeted with
reproducing racial thinking alias population studies. This chronotope is investigated in part 3, “Race
science in demographic policies: Supervising the populations (1940s-1980s)”.

3.3.Connecting the past and the presence: Segregation as ongoing implication of race science
The project sheds light on the intersectionality of race science as a source of its ongoing
reproduction, and the task of determining the negation of race science calls for interdisciplinary
approach as a response to the dilemma of historizing vs theorizing race science. The main
methodological approach proposed here is the exploration of scientific metaphors about the race,
nations, ethnic minorities on the one hand and the history of race science and its implications on the
other as two interrelated perspectives on the history of segregation in CEE countries. Interactive
metaphor operates as powerful scientific analogies which used one type of difference to explaining other
and vice versa (Gentner et all 2001). For instance, the consistent comparison of the Roma with children
introduced by Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellmann in the end of the 18th century remains a core vehicle
for producing the knowledge about the intractability of the Roma’s primitivism in favor of segregation
against them in the anthropological surveys in different countries over last two centuries (Willems
1997). Creating scientific metaphor is a distinctive intellectual operation aimed at using of a subsidiary
subject to foster insight into a principal subject. By obtaining a new meaning, metaphors are best
described as extensions of meaning (Black 1962). The power of metaphor is explained by their
outstanding potential to reproduce “the full range of similarities brought into play but not immediately
known or necessarily immediately predictable” (Stepan 1981). Thus, the history of ideas especially those
which produced violence of knowledge directly addresses to scientific metaphors and their career.
The interactive metaphors play double role in (re)producing knowledge as the vehicle through
which scientific imagination takes place and as the source or a simulated image – for theoretical

9
Victoria Shmidt FWF

representations. Typical of German historiography of Holocaust, the metaphors of “impenetrable and

thing sheen of civilization” and “the single row of barbed wire” (Smith 2008) are consistently
reproduced in the historiography of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia – inconsistent opposition
of historical periods e.g. interwar period vs. socialism or late imperial period vs. interwar period. By
making the idea of the past shattering and fragmented, these metaphors remain powerful frames in
theoretical consciousness leading the historical heritage of these countries to the arguments of
contingency and the responsibility of particular actors during particular periods but not the reflections
of reproducing epistemic injustice by the generations of scholars and practitioners over different periods.
I introduce a typology of historical narratives for mapping the variety of current approaches to
revising the origin and legacy of racial scientific metaphors in contemporary discursive practices. By
understanding the main object of revisiting race science in terms of the Bhaskarian negation and its
differentiation (Bhaskar 1991), I transform the Rüsen’s typology of historical narratives into a three-
fold classification of approaches to reconsidering the origin and legacy of eugenics: 1) traditional-
exemplary, based on real negation; 2) exemplary-critical, providing transformative negation; and 3)
critical-genetic, ensuring radical negation (Rüsen 2005). This interdisciplinary tool will be used for
remapping the historical arguments used by those who tried to reveal reproducing racial thinking in
current research projects. The outcomes of this study will be presented in the last chapter of monograph,
“Race science in contemporary discursive practices: Back to Europeanized future vs. Forward to the
racialized past”.

4.Innovative aspects and the potential input for the host institute (Southeast European
History and Anthropology, University of Graz)
The project focuses on the most decisive but unduly abandoned context - the role of inter-
country cooperation between racially minded scholars and their embeddedness at the supra-national
level of race science over the twentieth century as a key factor in (re)producing race science as an agent
of nation-building. Three interrelated extensions of the historical narration concerning race science
frame the novelty of this project:
 reinterpret the agenda of race science over the twentieth century in terms of changes in
the priorities of an ongoing nation-building with particular focus on the continuities between the interwar
and postwar periods;
 recognize more complete account of racial theories adopted and modified by scholars
in CEE countries towards elaborating more comprehensive understanding of the main pathways of
theorizing nation-building as an inter-country setting of producing racial knowledge;
 map the communities of racially minded scholars both in terms of temporal and spatial
differences amongst the countries in order to recognize the various compositions of the driving forces
that determined the ongoing reproduction of racial theories at intra- and inter-country levels.

10
Victoria Shmidt FWF

My project aligns with the SEEHA’s (Southeast European History and Anthropology) research
profile what ensures the intensive two-way exchange of competencies and experience within this project.
While SEEHA practices intensive informal peer-review across ongoing projects, I will get the access to
the highly contextualized and original approaches to the history of nation-building and racial science on
Balkans. In my turn, within regular internal and inter-departmental workshops I introduce new important
geopolitical contexts for recognizing the vicissitudes of South-Eastern European history, the
interrelation between Balkan countries and Bohemian lands, what will reinforce a core methodological
competence of SEEHA, to move from historical comparison to recognizing long-term reciprocity. While
SEEHA’s staff is sophisticated in visual analysis of photographs and fiction films, I am going to
juxtapose these flows of examining visual tropes of racial thinking with the exploration of outreaching
films aimed at distributing new gender patterns of healthy behavior. SEEHA emphasizes transferring
the research outputs into teaching and communicating public: online platforms for presenting the
research outcomes; international networking aimed at approaching the scholars in the early stages of
their career; interdisciplinary learning strategies. In line with these priorities, I will embed the outputs
of my research to interdisciplinary course “Science as an agent and structure of nation-building in
Central Eastern Europe: A longue durée of racial thinking” targeted with introducing into history of
anthropology, sociology, psychology, and genetics and their impact on the nation-building in CEE
countries. Along with it, I will participate in supervising postgraduate students, both Master and
Doctoral levels.

5. Importance of the expected results for the discipline

Shattered narratives about race science in CEE countries prevent to revise the role of epistemic
communities in producing the violence of knowledge against those groups which were labeled as ‘unfit’:
people with disabilities, ethnic minorities. Helmut Walser Smith, who analyzes the historical continuity
of segregation against the Jews in Germany, emphasizes the role of metaphors as connecting knowledge
and truth. The historical legacy of CEE countries calls for elaborating such connection as essential for
practicing epistemic justice. According to Karl Weick (1989), scholars depend on metaphors to grasp
the object of their study and have no choice in this, but can be more deliberate in the formation of these
images and more respectful of representations and efforts to improve it. One of the demandable ways to
equip the scholars by such repertoire as well as the options for its reflections in the case of segregation
is to revise the history of race science as an agent and a structure of nation-building what makes us
possible “to see with acuity the that structures later development” (Smith 2008).
By concluding her rigorous analysis of the long-term analogies between race and gender in Latin
American eugenics, Nancy Stepan mentioned: “The metaphors held by a particular scientific community
… can become unsatisfactory, because, for political or social or economic reasons, social formation
change and new aspects of human experience become important, are “seen”, and new metaphors
introduced” (Stepan 1986: 276). This project provides the grounds for the contemporary scientific

11
Victoria Shmidt FWF

community of CEE countries, as a sociological and political as well as scientific entity, for generating
new metaphors of human similarity and equality as opposed to metaphors of difference and inequality.
By telling the history of race science not in a country but in the region, this project puts forward
the diverse connections between the scientists from different countries, generations and communities
and stresses the responsibility for producing knowledge about minorities and its revision. In contrast to
country case method, focusing on inter-country operation of race science extends the options for
recognizing the dynamic of transferring ideas and practices aimed at practicing surveillance and
legitimizing it. Such shift responds to the demand of historical memory as an agency of epistemic justice
by elaborating “more hybridized, internally dialogized or self-questioning historiography” (LaCapra
2004: 521).
By juxtaposing the scientific metaphors around ethnic minorities and regarding the history of
race science in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, this project targets two core interrelated
methodological dilemmas of social history, theorization vs. historization and historical raptures vs.
continuities. Historically determined, the career of the racial ideas and theories developed from single
and often hypothetical ideas to a network of related conventional and well-defined scientific tools – but
this process has rarely if ever been studied empirically. The project juxtaposes various methods for
tracing the career of these tools distinguishing racial thinking in the CEE countries and investigating
the continuity of different cohorts of eugenically thinking intellectuals who (re)produced these root
metaphors – also within closed cooperation with each other.
Particularly, the project pays attention to the diverse ways of inter-country communication:
between the scholars (joint research and publications, the debates during the public events and in mass-
media, cross-referencing their writings), policy makers especially those who were responsible for
welfare policy and public health as vehicles of surveillance over minorities; mainstream cultures. The
project also traces the role of international agencies as important driving forces which introduced and
intensified inter-country cooperation in this region. Thus, by juxtaposing genetic approach to history of
segregation against ethnic minorities with a critical revisiting of race science, this project consolidates
the argument from the historical point of view with the sociological intention to limit clear-cut binary
opposition “ruptures vs. continuity” of historical process in order to avoid “the simplified critique of
the practices stemming from the past as primarily required for propaganda” (LaCapra 2004: 514).

6. Organizational framework of the project

6.1. Strategies for dissemination of results
The project will makes the impact on historicizing race science as a structure and agency of the
nation-building, and its outcomes mainly target scholars. Both historians and social scientists would be
interested in the interdisciplinary approach to revisiting the impact of the race science on nation-
building. The approach to indicating the composition of driving forces that determined the continuity
between different periods of nation building would be welcomed by historians interested in the

12
Victoria Shmidt FWF

methodological issues of historical narration. Also, the outputs of this project would be relevant to those
who teach future educators, helping professionals, and health care workers or practice critical pedagogy
in CEE countries (mainly, master’s and doctoral levels): they may be interested in supplementing the
tools of critical reflection concerning the past with a more consistent view on the post-colonial and
socialist legacy. The research outputs will be conversed into teaching activities, the course unit “Science
as an agent and structure of nation-building in Central Eastern Europe: A longue durée of racial
thinking”and supervising postgraduate students. Three types of publications, the articles in the journals
promoting interdisciplinary agenda (History and Theory); the monograph preliminary entitled “Race
science in CEE countries: Undiscovered Power of Building the Nations”, and collective volume as an
output of the interdisciplinary workshop will disseminate the outcomes of the project. UNI GRAZ
ensures the access to all publications due to the policy of gold access. I will participate in two
conferences, Historical Sociology and Global History (Barcelona, 2019) and International Federation
for Research in Women’s History (Poznan, 2020). In order to organize the discussions around
interlocutory outcomes, attract the attention of potential target groups, and involve them into the process
of dissemination, I will put the drafts of the monograph chapters on Academia.edu – this option
efficiently promotes the research outputs among various cohorts of scholars. The outcomes of the project
and relevant links will be published on SEEHA web-page and also as cross-links on friendly web-pages
of other academic institutions.

6.2. Strategies of communication of results

The aim of communicative strategy is to encourage the interest to history of ideas in the region
and to equip public by some critical lenses for revising racial thinking. My main strategy of
communication is to cooperate with already well-known web-portals which aim to popularize social
history and address main intended audiences, the teachers and students from secondary schools and
Universities, for reinforcing the purchasability of my outcomes. The revised analytical descriptions of
the race science in the region will be presented on the web of the project the Digital Archive on the
American Eugenics Movement which also publishes the information about eugenic movements around
the world with special focus on the inter-country and global levels of eugenics (portal
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org). This portal addresses abroad audience interested in global history of
race science. The teachers of high schools will be targeted by three essays on the European History
Online (http://ieg-ego.eu) within the thread “Models and Stereotypes”. These publications will present
the overview of the each of the parts to the monograph. Free e-learning platform TRAINING
ONLINE.EU mainly targeted with high school students will be used for preparing and implementing
two tutorials aimed at revising historical consciousness concerning racial assimilationism and
recapitulation theory. These tutorials will adopt the content of the course “Science as an agent and
structure of nation-building in Central Eastern Europe”.

13
Victoria Shmidt FWF

6.3.Work plan and project schedule

The activities within the project will be organized into nine Work Packages (WP) according to the aims
and planned results of the project:
WP1 Data Collection: Race science in Yugoslavia
Objectives: to gather and handle the data concerning the development of race science in Yugoslavia in
the archives of the Academies of science, Universities, libraries; three weeks for gathering the data in
each of the countries.
Milestones: M1.1 Collection of materials gathered in Croatia; M1.2 Collection of materials gathered in
Serbia; M1.3 Collection of materials gathered in Slovenia
WP2 Data Collection: The International race science
Objectives: to collect and handle the data about the role of international experts and research centers.
Milestones: M2.1 Collection of materials gathered in Scandinavian countries (two weeks); M2.2
Collection of materials gathered in the UK (one week); M2.3 Collection of materials gathered in
UNESCO Archives (one week).
WP3 Data collection: Race science and gender: Taking body, sexuality, and reproduction under
control
Objectives: to explore the transfer of the discursive practices elaborated by race science into the
campaigns aimed at involving males and females into the practices of reproduction desirable for the
states
Milestones: M 3.1 gathering data in the films archive, Zagreb (one week); M 3.2 gathering data in the
films archive, Beograd (two weeks); M3.3 gathering data in the films archive, Ljubljana (one week)
WP4 Race science as an agent of emancipation: Shaping the nations (1890s-1920s)
Objectives: to recognize the pathways of transferring the ideas employed for homogenizing the nations
(common Slav origin, Europeanisation as hybridization, whiteness) and emancipating from the colonial
past.
Deliverables: D 4.1 draft of the first part to the monograph
WP5 Race science as a structure of internal colonialism: Practicing statehood (1920s-1940s)
Objectives: to deepen understanding of resemblance and differences in the composition of driving forces
of elaborating race science in the countries with particular focus on the political and religious affiliation
of the interwar cohorts of scholars; to reevaluate the adoption of Western colonialism by the
anthropologists for conducting the surveys in periphery and the ex-change of the approaches.
Deliverables: D 5.1 draft of the second part to the monograph
WP6 Race science in demographic policies: Supervising the populations (1940s-1980s)
Objectives: to indicate the role of anthropologists, geneticists, and psychologists, their inter-country
cooperation in legalizing and promoting the desirable for the state gender-based patterns of work and
reproductive behavior;
Deliverables: D 6.1. draft of the third part to the monograph

14
Victoria Shmidt FWF

WP7 Race science in contemporary discursive practices: Back to Europeanized future vs.
Forward to the racialized past
Objectives: to examine contemporary modes of reproducing enlightened racism and the role of race
science as resonating with reproducing overt racial theories in diverse public campaigns;
Deliverables: D 7.1. draft of the article to History & Theory; D 7.2 draft of the fourth part to the
monograph
WP8 Dissemination
Objectives: to maximise the impact of the research on revisiting the interrelation between race science
and history of nation-building amongst diverse academic groups
Deliverables: D 8.1, 8.7 participation in the conference; D8.2 discussion on Academia.edu, first part;
D 8.3 discussion on Academia.edu, second part; D 8.5 article in History&Theory; D8.6 the discussion
on the Academia.edu, third part; D 8.4 teaching course “Science as an agent and structure of nation-
building in Central Eastern Europe: A longue durée of racial thinking”; D 8.8 the manuscript of
monograph “Race science in CEE countries: Undiscovered Power of Building the Nations”.
WP9 Communication
Objectives: to apply the project outcomes for reinforcing the sensitivity to racial thinking and redefining
of the approaches to collective memories
Deliverables: D 9.1. –D 9.2 Tutorials for TRAINING ONLINE.EU; D 9.3, 9.5, 9.6 the essays to the
European History Online; D 9.4 Publication for the Digital Archive on the American Eugenics
Movement.

15
Victoria Shmidt FWF

Gantt chart

Work Package- Year 1 Year 2

Title
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
WP1 Data M1.1 M1.2 M1.3

Collection:
Yugoslavia

WP2 Data M2.1 M2.2

M2.3
Collection:
International
WP3 Race M M3.2 M
3.1 3.3
science and
gender
WP4 (1890s- D
4.1
1920s)
WP5 (1920s- D 5.1

1940s)
WP6 (1940s- D
6.1
1980s)
WP7 Current race D7.1 D 7.2

science
WP8 D D D D D 8.4 D D D 8. D D
8.1 8.2 8.3, 8.4 8.4 8.5 6 8.7 8.8
Dissemination D
8.4

WP9 D 9.1 D 9.2 D 9.3 D 9.4 D D

9.5 9.6
Communication

16
Victoria Shmidt FWF

7 Research site: Quality of the supervision and of the integration in the team/institution
My co-applicant, Prof. Karl Kaser is one of the most prominent experts in revising the
history of Balkans towards elaborating interdisciplinary explanatory schemes. He published
more than ten monographs and more than forty articles in peer-reviewed journals. I rely upon
his experience of juxtaposing post-imperial and post-colonial studies as one of the main
resources for elaborating my methodological approach in each of the project’s stages. Being a
sophisticated supervisor (getting more than twenty doctoral students and more than ten
international projects), Prof. Kaser will provide unique options for refining my historical
reflexivity and elaborating my own strategies of co-leading workshops and editing collective
volumes. The field of his expertise encompasses diverse historical periods (one of the examples
is the volume “Power and legacy. Manhood, ownership and family in Eastern Europe (1500-
1900)“, 2000), and Prof. Kaser will lead me to better argumentation of the continuities and
ruptures in the interplay of the nation-building and race science.
The rigorous approach of Prof. Kaser to bringing together professional and public
discourses in exploring the global transfer of units of cultural information inspires me to deepen
the approaches to recognize the impact of race science on shaping the patterns of public health
propaganda. His particular focus on gender relation and the discursive practices alias visual
tropes within public discourse concerning family life makes more profound the intersectionality
of gender, ethnicity, and class, which is a core framework for elaborating more comprehensive
concept of race science in terms of its implications, one of the most desirable outcomes for my
project. Prof. Kaser is extremely experienced in public communication aimed at translating the
outcomes of researches concerning such sensitive topics as the history of nations and inter-
national tensions, and I am going to improve the competencies of promoting the outcomes of
my research during the period of fellowship.
Established in 1970 and being interdisciplinary by origin, SEEHA has been elaborating
on a wide range of research activities aimed at revising the approaches toward the interrelation
between different countries over different periods of the past. This focus as well as geographical
location of SEEHA ensures the unique opportunities for my project. The closeness of SEEHA
to Balkans arranges the accessibility of the archives, networks of the colleagues from Bulgarian,
Croatian, Serbian, and Slovenian research institutes, and a wide range of other facilitates
indispensable for maintaining the main objectives of the project and minimizing such risks as
missing important contexts, loosing the recognition by local experts, choosing inappropriate
ways of dissemination and communication. Primary analysis of the collections of the materials
possessed by SEEHA (e.g. Visual Archive Southeastern Europe) helps to maximize the stage

17
Victoria Shmidt FWF

of desk-research by exploring the already collected data and mapping the next stages of the
field research at the archives and libraries. The competencies and willingness of the staff to
provide formal and informal peer-review of my interlocutory outcomes predisposes in-time
reflections aimed at preventing such risks as missing the important contexts and alternative
interpretations. I am going to be in closed cooperation with Ch. Promitzer (UNI Graz) who is
one of the leading experts of race science on Balkans and D. Gutmeyr (UNI Graz) who
successfully develops new methodologies of comparative historical analysis. Intra-university
cooperation of SEEHA with the Centre for the Study of Balkan Societies and Cultures will
extend interdisciplinary lenses of my research. The sustainable long-term cooperation of
SEEHA with the most influential international experts whose experience is significant to my
research will energize the final stage of revising the legacy of race science aimed at indicating
the strategies of path departure from the pathway of racial thinking. The array of outreach
activities (public lectures, online promotion of research outputs, systematic approaching local
academic networks) will encourage my plan of dissemination and communication.
8. Ethical considerations
There are no ethical considerations in my project

18
Victoria Shmidt FWF

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bartulin, N. The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia: Origins and Theory. (Leiden: Brill,
2014)
Bhabha N. The Location of Culture, (London Routledge: 1990):139-170
Bhaskar, Roy Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)
Black M. Models and Metaphors Studies in language and Philosophy (Cornell University Press Ithaca
New York, 1962)
Bucur, M. “Remapping the Historiography of Modernization and State-Building in Southeastern Europe
through Health, Hygiene and Eugenics,” in Promitzer, Ch., Trubeta, S., and Turda, M. Health, Hygiene
and Eugenics, (Budapest CEU Press 2011) pp. 427–46
Chakrabarty D. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and historical difference. (New Jersy:
Princeton University Press 2000).
Collier, A. Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy (London: Verso, 1994)
Cergol, A. “Evgenika na Slovenskem v perspektivi spola” [Eugenics in Slovenia from the Perspective
of Gender]. Zgodovinski časopis 63, no. 3–4 (2009): 408–25.
Cergol, A. Javni in zasebni vidiki rodnostnih strategij Slovenk in Slovencev v prvi Jugoslaviji
[Formal and Informal Strategies of Fertility among Slovenians in the First Yugoslavia]. Doctoral
Dissertation, University of Ljubljana, 2014.
Dugac, Ž. Kako biti čist i zdrav: Zdravstveno prosvjećivanje u međuratnoj Hrvatskoj [How to Be Clean
and Healthy: Health Education in Interwar Croatia]. (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2010).
Dugac, Ž. O sestrama, siromašnima i bolesnima: Slike socijalne i zdravstvene povijesti međuratnog
Zagreba [On Nurses, Poor, and Sick: Instances from the Social and Medical History of Interwar Zagreb].
(Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2015).
Fallace T.“Recapitulation Theory and the new education: Race, Culture, imperialism, and Pedagogy,
1894/1916” Curriculum Inquiry 2012 42(4): 510-533;
Genter D., Bowlde, B.F., Wolff, P.and Boronat, C Metaphor is like Analogy in D.Gentner, K.J.
Gentner, Bowdle, B.F. B,N. Kokinov (eds) The analogical mind: perspectives from cognitive science
pp. 199-253 (Cambridge MA MIT Press 2001)
Guess, T. “The Social Construction of Whiteness: Racism by Intent, Racism by Consequence,” Critical
Sociology 2006 32(4): 649–73,
Hall S. Race, the floating signifier (Media Education Foundation, 1997)
Koops W. “No development psychology without recapitulation theory” European journal of
developmental psychology 2015 12(6): 630-639;
Kuhar, M. “Eros or Ethnos: Pioneering statistical survey on prostitution at the beginning of the 20th
century.” Clinics in Dermatology 33 (2015): 498–503.

19
Victoria Shmidt FWF

Kuhar, M. Eugenika u hrvatskoj medicini i njezin utjecaj na javnost u razdoblju od 1859. do 1945.
[Eugenics in Croatian Medicine and Its Public Influence from 1859 to 1945]. Doctoral Dissertation,
University of Zagreb, 2015.
Kuhar, M. “‘From an Impure Source, All Is Impure’: The Rise and Fall of Andrija Štampar’s Public
Health Eugenics in Yugoslavia.” Social History of Medicine 30, no. 1 (2017): 92–113.
Kuhar, M, and Fatović-Ferenčić, S.. “Prostitutes and criminals: beginnings of eugenics in Croatia in the
works of Fran Gundrum from Oriovac (1856–1919).” Croatian Medical Journal 53 (2012): 185–97.
Kuhar, M., and Fatović-Ferenčić, S.. “Antropologija jedinke, spolnosti i rase u Djelima Frana
Gundruma Oriovčanina (1856. – 1919.)” [Anthropology of the Individual, Sex and Race in the Works
of Fran Gundrum Oriovčanin (1856–1919)]. Acta Medico-Historica Adriatica 13 (Suppl. 1) (2015):
79–96.
Kühl, S. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
LaCapra, D History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Cornell University Press 2004)
Lipphardt, V. and Widmer A. Health and Difference. Rendering Human Variation in Colonial
Engagements Series ‘Biosocial Societies’, (Berghahn Books, 2016)
McMahon, R. The Races of Europe: Construction of National Identities in the Social Sciences, 1839–
1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Mircheva, G. “Regimes of ‘Degeneration’ and ‘Regeneration’: Eugenics and Modernization in Bulgaria
before the Second World War,” in ‘Regimes of Historicity’ in Southeastern and Northern Europe,
1890–1945: Discourses of Identity and Temporality, edited by Mishkova, D., Trencsényi, B., and
Jalava M. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 188–209
Musil, J. “Eugenický entuziasmus: Ideály humanitní a zušlechťování národa” [Eugenic Enthusiasm:
Ideals of Humanism and Improvement of the Nation], České, slovenské a československé dějiny 20.
století [The Czech, Slovak and Czechoslovak History of the Twentieth Century], 9, (2014), 197–206;
Pantović, L. Eugenics and the “Nation” in the Writings of a Turn-of-the-Century Serbian Physician:
the case of Milan Jovanović Batut. Master’s Thesis, Central European University, Budapest, 2013.
Promitzer, Ch. “Taking Care of the National Body: Eugenic Visions in Interwar Bulgaria, 1905–1940.”
In Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–
1940, edited by Marius Turda and Paul J. Weindling, 223–51. (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007).
Redman, S. J. Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016)
Rüsen, J. History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005)
Šimůnek, M. “Deus iudicat, cum nemo accusat. Reflexe, dokumentace a (ne)vyšetřování nacistické
‘eutanazie’ v Československu v letech 1945–1990” [Considerations, Documentation and

20
Victoria Shmidt FWF

(Non)Investigation of Nazi “Euthanasia” in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1990], Securitas Imperii 2015

27(2): 138–67
Šimůnek M. and Hoßfeld, U. “Trofim D. Lysenko in Prague 1960. A historical note,” Studies in the
History of Biology 2013 , 5(2): 84–88
Smith H. W. Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the long Nineteenth
Century (Vanderbilt University Cambridge University Press 2008)
Spektorowski, A. “Fascism and Post-National Europe: Drieu La Rochelle and Alain de Benoist,”
Theory, Culture & Society 2016 33 (1): 115–138
Stepan, N. Race and gender: the role of analogy in science. Isis 1986 77( 2): 261-277.
Stojanovic, A. “Eugenics and Racial Hygiene in Theory and Political Thought of the Serbian/Yugoslav
Extreme Right 1918–1944,” Acta historiae medicinae, stomatologiae, pharmaciae, medicinae
veterinariae 2015 34 (1): 68–88
Stone, D. “Nazi race ideologues,” Patterns of prejudice 2016 50 4(5): 445-457
Turda, M. The History of East-Central European Eugenics, 1900–1945: Sources and Commentaries.
(London: Bloomsbury, 2015)
Weick, K. “Theory Construction as Disciplined Imagination“ The Academy of Management Review
1989 14(4): 516-531
Willems, W. In search of the true Gypsies From Enlightenment to Final Solution (USA: Routledge
1997).
Winant , H. “Race, ethnicity and social science” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2015 38(13): 2176-2185
Yeomans, R. “Eradicating ‘Undesired Elements’: National Regeneration and the Ustasha Regime’s
Program to Purify the Nation, 1941–1945,” in Race science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938–1945, ed.
Weiss-Wendt A. and Yeomans R. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 198–236
Ziherl, S., Èebašek-Travnik,Z. and Zupaniè-Slavec, Z.“The Extermination of Psychiatric Patients in
Occupied Slovenia in 1941” International Journal of Mental Health 2007 36(1): 99–104

21
Victoria Shmidt FWF

CV OF MAIN APPLICANT, VICTORIA SHMIDT

First name, Family name: Victoria Shmidt
Date of birth: 26/01/1975
Nationality: Russian
Address Musilova 9, Brno, 61400, Czech Republic
e-mails: 320753@mail.muni.cz, schmidtvica@yahoo.com
mobile phone: #420 773939664
ORCID identifier: 0000-0002-0344-9239
Scopus Author ID: 56347792000
Web: https://is.muni.cz/auth/osoba/320753, https://muni.academia.edu/VicaSchmidt

Victoria Shmidt brings together the issue of historical roots of segregation with the legacy of
colonial and socialist policies in Central Eastern European countries. Victoria started her
academic career in Russia, and this period formed part of her broader interest to the historical
roots of ongoing institutional violence against diverse disfranchised groups. In 2008, Victoria
transferred to the Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, and began to elaborate the issue
of institutional violence against the Roma and people with disabilities in the Czech lands. It has
led her to deepening the approaches towards race science and racial thinking as agents and
structures of nation-building and inclined to revise the spatial, temporal and ideological borders
in the taken-for-granted approaches toward the role of researchers and academic institutions in
the most extremal forms of transgression.
CURRENT POSITION(S)
 01.03.2013 – present time, senior researcher, Institute for research of inclusive
education studies, Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
PREVIOUS POSITIONS
25.09.2010- 12.12.2017, lecturer, Department of social policy and social work, Faculty
of social studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
 01.09.2002-.01.01.2008 dean, lecturer, post-graduate institution Moscow school of
social and economics sciences, faculty of social administration and social work
 01.02.2001-01.11.2008 Senior researcher, the centre of social policy studies, the
Institute of Central Eastern European countries (since 2003 Institute of transitional
economies’ studies), the Russian Academy of Sciences
 01.09.1996-31.08.2000 Psychologist, day care centre of psychosocial assistance for
families and children, Volgograd
 01.09.1993-1996 Teacher of mathematics for children with mental disabilities,
Volgograd
EDUCATION

22
Victoria Shmidt FWF

 01.02.2008 – 12.06.2012, doctoral student (social policy), Masaryk University, Brno,

Czech Republic Thesis topic: How does history predestine contemporary issues of child
protection in CEE countries: beyond the issue of socialist path dependence
 01.09.2000-25.10.2001 Master of sciences (social policy, Moscow School of Social and
Economic Sciences, under University of Manchester) Thesis topic: Comparative
analysis of social rights’ protection: multidisciplinary approach towards women’s and
elderly people social rights
 30.06.1996-28.12.1998 Candidate of psychological sciences, the educational
psychology (Psychological Institute of Russian Academy of education, Moscow)
Thesis’s topic: Primary School students: beyond the periodization approach to
cognitive and affective development
 12.08.1991-10.06.1996 Specialist, School psychology, Teaching of mathematic and IT
in education, Volgograd state pedagogical University Thesis topic: How to teach
speaking “Mathematic language”: The psychological issues of teaching geometry and
algebra to the children with learning difficulties

PUBLIC EVENTS CONTRIBUTIONS

1. 4-6.10.2018 Lecture Institutional violence against the Roma in the interwar
Czechoslovak periphery: The role of campaigns concerning infectious diseases in the
Conference The Local and the Regional Dimensions of 1918/19. A Comparison,
Hannah Arendt Institute, Dresden
2. 9.11.2017. Public lecture Öffentliche Gesundheit als Mittel des inneren Kolonialismus
in der Tschechoslowakei der Zwischenkriegszeit: Die Diskursgestaltung über die
Kinder der Nation. Collegium Carolinum, Munich
3. 10.5. 2017.Keynote speaker Frauenaktivismus und Feminismus in Belarus und
Russland. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Berlin
4. 7.12.2015, Workshop for the doctoral students Eugenics and Female Embodiment in
Czechoslovak Public Campaigns and Movies during the 1960s and 1970s. Oxford
Brookes,
5. 25-28.09. 2015 “Rescue our children”?: the public discourses to reform residential care
for disabled children in the post-Soviet countries. The chief of section, 12th ESA
conference Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination.

MEMBERSHIPS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES

 2013 – present time The history of eugenics in CEU countries, Oxford Brookes
University
 2018 - present time The Quest for Welfare and Democracy, European University
Institute
 2018 – present time Gypsy Lore Society

RESEARCH PROJECTS FUNDED IN THE PAST

 08.05.2018-31.12.2018 “The Czech comic female bildungsroman from the 19th century
to nowadays: Building the Nation by Raising the Laugh against Women?”, the
individual Grant of the Czech National Literature Foundation

23
Victoria Shmidt FWF

 01.06.2017-31.12.2018 “The policy of internal colonialism in Czechoslovak public

health between 1918 and 1989”, the individual Grant for preparing to Habilitation at
the Charles University, Prague, the route Social Policy
 01.01.2015-31.12.2017 “Child welfare discourses and practices in the Czech lands: the
segregation of Roma and disabled children during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries”, the Head investigator of the research project 15-10625S, Czech Science
Foundation
 01.01.2014-31.12.2015 “Female activism in Belarus: invisible and untouchable, the
survey of non-systematic initiations amongst women from oppositional movements in
Belarussian regions”, the Head investigator supported by Stephan Bathory foundation,
Poland
 01.01.2010-31.12.2013 “(Re)vision of Social Policy in Post-Soviet Space: ideologies,
actors and cultures” supported by Higher Education Support Program (Open Society
Foundation), senior researcher, convener of training and supervision for lecturers from
post-USSR countries

FELLOWSHIPS
 01.04.2018-02.05.2018 Host researcher at Herder-Institute, Marburg, ‘The education
of the Roma: A never-ending story of whiteness’
 01.11.2017-01.12.2017 Host researcher at the Collegium Carolinum, Munich, “The
policies of internal colonialism in the interwar Czechoslovakia“
 01.03.2017-30.06.2017 Host researcher at Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, “Eugenic
thinking in the CEE countries: never-ending story of root metaphors?“, Gerda Henkel
Foundation
 01.06.2014-31.07.2014 Visegrad scholarship at the Open Society Archive, Budapest,
Hungary
 01.03.2013- 31.12.2015 Post-doctoral fellowship, European Commission & Ministry
of Education, Youth and Physical culture, Czech Rep.

24
Victoria Shmidt FWF

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS OF MAIN APPLICANT, VICTORIA SHMIDT

2013-2018
PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
1. Politics of surveillance in the interwar Czechoslovak periphery: The role of campaigns
concerning infectious diseases Journal of East Central European Studies 2018 N4
forthcoming
2. Race science in Czechoslovakia: Serving segregation in the name of the Nation Studies
in History and Philosophy 2018, N 4 forthcoming
3. Public health as an agent of internal colonialism in interwar Czechoslovakia: shaping
the discourse about the nation’s children Patterns of Prejudices 2018, No4 pp. 355-387
4. Eugenics and Female Embodiment in Czechoslovak Public Campaigns during the
1960s and 1970s Bohemia 2018, N1
5. Building the Czechoslovak nation and sacralizing peoples’ health: The vicissitudes of
disability discourse during the 1920s Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern
Europe, 2017, 3 pp.307-329
6. Violence of knowledge in practices around Roma in the Czech Republic: historical echo
of surveillance during the socialism Global Humanities – Studies in Histories, Cultures,
and Societies, 2016, 4, pp.117-138
7. Attachment in “action”: the theorisation of maternal bond in the Czech (post)socialist
psychology Laboratorium 2016, 1, pp. 58-81
8. Eugenics and special education in the Czech lands during the Interwar Period: The
beginning of segregation against disabled and Roma, Social work and society, 14 (1)
2016
9. L'istruzione per i rom. Dalla Cecoslovacchia socialista alle pratiche attuali. Autonomie
locali e servizi sociali, 2016, 1, 23-44.
10. Children’s rights in post-Soviet countries: The case of Russia and Belarus 2014
4 pp.447-460 International social work in co-authoring with Tatjana Schurko
11. Institutionalisation of children in the Czech Rep: a case of path dependency. Journal of
sociology and social welfare, in co-authoring with Jo Daugherty Bailey, 2014 No. 1 pp.
53-75.

BOOK CHAPTERS
1. Czech child protection after 1989: Between socialist legacy and the European call for
democratic legitimacy in Skivenes M., Berrick, J., Gilbert N.,(eds.) International
Handbook of Child Protection Systems, Oxford Press, 2018 forthcoming
2. The attitude of feminist activists to domestic violence: Strange case of epistemic
injustice in contemporary Belarus in G. Viggiani and S. Pozzolo (eds), Investigating
Gender-based Violence, Wildy and Simmons Ltd, London, 2016 pp.130-167
3. Lost in Transition: Missed opportunities for reforming disabled children’s education in
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. In Michael Rasell, Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova.
Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union History, policy and everyday
life. London: Routledge, 2013. pp. 263-278
4. Foster Caregivers in Procrustean Bed of the Czech Child Protection. In VOJTOVÁ, V.,
ČERVENKA. K. et al. Intervence pro inkluzi. Intervention for Inclusion. Brno:
Masarykova univerzita, 2013. pp. 210-225

25
Victoria Shmidt FWF

BOOKS
1. Segregating in the Name of the Nation: The Politics of Disability in Czechoslovakia
Amsterdam University Press, 2018 forthcoming
2. Child welfare discourses and practices in the Czech lands: the segregation of Roma and
disabled children during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Brno: MUNI PRESS,
2015.
3. The female activism in Belarus: invisible and untouchable book in co-authoring with
Irina Solomatina Lithuania, Kaunus: Taurapolis, 2015.
4. Family and childhood policies in post-socialism. Higher school of economics Moscow:
Variant ISBN 978-5-00080-003-4, 2014 the chief editor of the monograph

10 most important scientific/scholarly publications in the entire career to date

1. Public health as an agent of internal colonialism in interwar Czechoslovakia: shaping
the discourse about the nation’s children Patterns of Prejudices 2018, 4 pp. 355-387
2. Building the Czechoslovak nation and sacralizing peoples’ health: The vicissitudes of
disability discourse during the 1920s Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern
Europe, 2017, 3 pp.307-329
3. Eugenics and special education in the Czech lands during the Interwar Period: The
beginning of segregation against disabled and Roma, Social work and society, 14 (1)
2016
4. Children’s rights in post-Soviet countries: The case of Russia and Belarus 2014
4 pp.447-460 International social work in co-authoring with Tatjana Schurko
5. Child welfare discourses and practices in the Czech lands: the segregation of Roma and
disabled children during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Brno: MUNI PRESS,
2015.
6. Institutionalisation of children in the Czech Rep: a case of path dependency. Journal of
sociology and social welfare, in co-authoring with Jo Daugherty Bailey, 2014 1 pp. 53-
75.
7. Lost in Transition: Missed opportunities for reforming disabled children’s education in
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. In Michael Rasell, Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova.
Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union History, policy and
everyday life. London: Routledge, 2013. pp. 263-278
8. ‘Orphan care in Russia: cause for dismantling the down staircase’. In Orphan care: a
comparative view. USA: Kumarian, 2012. ISBN 978-1-56549-484-8 pp. 83-100
9. Orphan Care in Russia. Social work and society, 2009, 7
https://www.socwork.net/sws/article/view/44/347
10. Interdisciplinary approach to the social exclusion Journal of social policy studies
2004. 2. 4. pp. 547–566

26
Victoria Shmidt FWF

CV of co-applicant, Prof. Karl Kaser

First name, Family name: Karl Kaser
Date of birth: 06/11/1954
Nationality: Austrian

Address Southeast European History and Anthropology University of Graz Mozartgasse 3

8010 Graz, Austria

e-mails: karl.kaser@uni-graz.at
ORCID identifier: 0000-0002-9991-0295
Main research fields Visual cultures, history of family and kinship in the Balkans, gender
relations, historical anthropology
CURRENT POSITION(S)
Chair of the Centre for Southeast European History and Anthropology at University of Graz
PREVIOUS POSITIONS
1996 Appointment as Full Professor for Southeast European History at University of Graz and
as Director of the Centre for Southeast European History
1991 Visiting Appointment: Department of History, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
1988 Appointment as Adjunct Assistant Professor
1980- Involvement in research and teaching at the Centre for Southeast European Studies of
the Institute for History at the University of Graz
EDUCATION
1986 Habilitation; thesis: “Free Peasant and Soldier, the Militarization of the Agrarian Society
on the Croatian-Slavonian Military Border, 1535-1881”
1980 Completed studies through the doctorate specializing the Southeast European History
1974 Enrolled at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz in with a major in history and minor in
Slavic Languages and Literature
MOST RECENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
2010-2014 P22104-G18 ‘Visualizing Family, Gender Relations, and the Body: The Balkans,
approx. 1860-1950‘
2010-2014 FWF P22659-G18 ‘The Kosovar Family Revisited‘
2012-2016 EU/Marie Curie PIRSES-GA2011-295167 ‘Politics of Memory and Memory
Cultures of the Russian-Ottoman War 1877/1878: From Divergence to Dialogue‘
2014-2017 FWF P26437-G15 ‘Austrian-Hungarian Albanology 1867-1918 – a case of
cultural imperialism?’

27
Victoria Shmidt FWF

2017-2020 EU/Marie Skłodowska-Curie MSCA-RISE PN: 734645 ‘Knowledge Exchange

and Academic Cultures in the Humanities: Europe and the Black Sea Region, late 18th – 21st
Centuries’
Editor of series/journals
Zur Kunde Südosteuropas (sole editor)
Studies on South East Europe (sole editor)
Glasnik Etnografskog Instituta SANU (member of editorial board)
Istorijski zapisi (member of editorial board)
Sociological Analysis (member of editorial board)
Ekologija i Ekonomija (member of editorial board)
Dubrovački anali (member of editorial board)

28
Victoria Shmidt FWF

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS, KARL KASER

2013-2018
PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
Visual cultures in Southeastern Europe - Elements of decentered theory formation Zeitschrift
fur Balkanologie 49 (1), 2013, pp. 47-59
Abortion and pronatalist policies in the socialist Balkan countries Balkanistic Forum 1-2,
2016, pp. 197-206
Cinema Balkanica in early 20th century – an amalgam of western and regional modernities
Balkanistik Forum 2015 1 1 pp. 163-180
Text und Bild – bleibt die Südosteuropaforschung auf einem Auge blind? Südosteuropaische
Hefte 2013 1 78-85
Disciplinary Boundaries in Question: Balkan Studies in a Globalizing World
Godišnjak/Jahrbuch 2013,42:215-226. DOI: 10.5644/Godisnjak
BOOKS

Hollywood on Balkans. The visual Modern in European periphery (1900–1970) (Böhlau

2018)
Andere Blicke. Religionen und visuelle Kulturen auf dem Balkan und im Nahen Osten
(2013)
10 most important scientific/scholarly publications in the entire career to date
1. Ahnenkult und Patriarchalismus auf dem Balkan Historische Anthropologie Volume 1,
Issue 1, April 1993, pp. 93-122
2. The balkan joint family household: Seeking its origins Continuity and Change Volume
9, Issue 1, 1 May 1994, pp. 45-68
3. Power and inheritance male domination, property, and family in eastern Europe, 1500-
1900 History of the Family Volume 7, Issue 3, 2002, pp. 375-395
4. Peoples of the mountains, peoples of the plains: Space and ethnographic representation
Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe
Volume 5, October 15, 2003, pp. 216-230
5. Family networks in crisis situations migrants from balkan anatolia Familiendynamik
34( 4), 2009, pp. 360-368
6. Household and Family in the Balkans: Two Decades of Historical Family research at
University of Graz, 2012
7. Visual cultures in Southeastern Europe - Elements of decentered theory formation
Zeitschrift fur Balkanologie 49 (1), 2013, pp. 47-59
8. Andere Blicke. Religionen und visuelle Kulturen auf dem Balkan und im Nahen Osten
(2013)
9. Abortion and pronatalist policies in the socialist Balkan countries Balkanistic Forum
1-2, 2016, pp. 197-206
10. Hollywood on Balkans. The visual Modern in European periphery (1900–1970) (2017)

29