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This workshop aims to explore transfer and circulation of expert knowledge across socialist worlds in the post-1945 period of decolonization. The workshop brings together scholars with regional expertise, Eastern European and/or Asian, to seek commonalities between histories and historiographies that cut across regions, geopolitical blocs and continents. We invite contributions on different forms of knowledge transfer in fields such as science, technology, medicine, development, ideology, and military, both between socialist worlds and between experts on all sides of the Cold War.

Bringing these stories together, we will tell a story of expert circulation in the “socialist world.” These were regions where socialism was the dominant state ideology, where socialist parties were politically dominant, or where “progressive” export cultures played important roles. Yet we also wish to consider how experts from “socialist cultures” interacted globally, and were part of broader transnational debates over modernisation, political development, technology, and decolonization. Connections were made, for example, between Eastern Europe and India, as well as Socialist China and India, that defied Cold War blocs. Bringing scholars working across these regions, and on the place of these regions in a global perspective, will help provide important new insights into non-western contributions to various fields of knowledge in the wake of decolonisation.

Registration is required, and attendees are required to read the pre-circulated papers ahead of time. Please register on Eventbrite.

This event is co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, The Harriman Institute, and The Center for Science and Society at Columbia University, and the University of Exeter.