Zukunftskolleg
Germany
fellow
Katerina Suverina
2024-2025
2025-2026
2026-2027
Discipline(s)
Contemporary history; Cultural studies; Health Sciences; Humanities; Interdisciplinary Studies; Modern history; Social and economic history; Social Sciences; Sociology
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies; Democracy, Citizenship, Governance; Gender, Family & Youth; Identity; Inequalities, inclusion & Social Innovation; Performing arts; Public Policies; Regional Studies
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Katerina Suverina defended her doctoral thesis at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow) in May 2022. After working as an assistant professor at the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Potsdam, she joined the Zukunftskolleg in 2024 for a 2-year Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research focuses on gender studies, history of sexuality, trauma studies and critical theory.
Research Project
Biopolitical Violence and a Society of Hope: HIV/AIDS in the Late USSR
In 2023, no cultural, social, or even medical history of the late Soviet and Russian HIV/AIDS epidemic has been written. HIV/AIDS remains a silenced figure in Russia’s contemporary public and academic discourses. At the same time, for most people in the country, an HIV-positive status has only one meaning: terrible stigma. When was this stigma created: at the beginning of the epidemic in the 1980s––or in the 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR, when intravenous drugs proliferated? Who were the main actors who contributed to the spread of this stigma and violent attitudes towards HIV-positive people? How did different actors of the Soviet system help to create a discourse of inverted care and the culture of stigma? What kind of impact did HIV/AIDS have on health governance, politics, and society in general? How did the stigmatized image of HIV-positive people contribute to the spread and consolidation of conspiracy theories, fear, and almost pervasive dehumanization during the late Soviet period?
Research Interests:
History; Sociology; Gender Studies; Trauma Studies; History of Sexuality; HIV; medical anthropology; history of public health; conspiracy theories; memory politics; Drag Culture