Ana is a social and cultural historian whose research focuses on the history of modern Europe and the Balkans, history of war and violence, and history of psychiatry. She is currently Lecturer in Twentieth Century International History at the University of Exeter. Her first monograph was Therapeutic Fascism: Experiencing the violence of the Nazi New Order in Yugoslavia (OUP 2016) and was awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. Before starting at Exeter, Ana was a post-doctoral fellow at Birkbeck as a member of The Reluctant Internationalists research group.
Ana’s current project, ‘Exporting Socialism to the Global South: Socialist Globalisation, Transcultural Psychiatry and Yugoslav Experts in the Decolonising World’, explores the circulation of psychiatric knowledge between Communist Eastern Europe and the decolonising global South, asking how the history of the post-WWII years can be re-written from an alternative, non-Western perspective, and how East European experts shaped the global production of knowledge in the Cold War. It zooms in on Yugoslavia’s psychiatric technical assistance missions to Guinea, Ghana and Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, and traces the political and medical interventions of Communist/non-aligned psychiatrists who tried to offer an ideological alternative to the failed Western colonial project. The research aims to de-centre the global history of transcultural psychiatry and to revise the traditional narratives of decolonisation and Communism. Moreover, it rethinks the history of the post-WWII period by exploring international projects which challenged the bipolarity of the Cold War, and linked Eastern Europe, the former colonial powers and the decolonising African societies.