European Healthcare Histories

Core Group

Here you will find the core members of the groups and their contact details

Meet our core Group
Prof Barry Doyle
Action Chair, Grant Holder Scientific Representative

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Barry Doyle is Professor of Health History in the Centre for the History of Science, technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, UK. He is the Chair of COST Action CA22159 National, International and Transnational Histories of Healthcare, 1850-2000 (EuroHealthHist). His research focuses on the comparative history of hospitals and health systems and his work has covered hospitals in England, comparative work on England and France, a project on the interwar health history of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, and a comparative study of healthcare in British and French West Africa. He has been working with Dr Rosemary Cresswell of Oxford University on First Aid in Britain and France. He is chair of the editorial board of the journal Social History of Medicine.

Dr Helene Castenbrandt
Action Vice Chair

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Helene Castenbrandt is a researcher in the Department of Economic History at Lund University, Sweden. Trained as a historian, she earned her PhD from the University of Gothenburg in 2012 for her dissertation on dysentery epidemics in Sweden between 1750 and 1900, exploring the disease’s demographic and medical history. She then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen, where she focused her work on sickness funds and health in early 20th-century Sweden. Her research concerns medical and population history, particularly the development of healthcare institutions, access to healthcare, and the historical management of epidemic diseases.

Dr Angelo Basteris
Science Officer

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Ms Aldona Gembalik
Administrative Officer

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Dr Ciara Henderson
Science Communication Coordinator

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Ciara Henderson is a postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, School of Nursing & Midwifery, where she completed her Health Sciences doctorate.  Whilst currently working on post institutional models of care, Ciara’s doctoral research focuses on reproductive mortality – miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal death – and the evolution of grief theory, maternity care and social responses to death, since the nineteenth century.  An expert on burial practices, her research bridges cultural history, psychology, and public health to inform compassionate, culturally sensitive bereavement care and healthcare policy.

Ms Maria Mundi-Lopez
Grant Awarding Coordinator

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María Mundi López is a PhD candidate at the University of Granada (Department of History of Science) in co-supervision with EHESS (Centre for the Study of Social Movements), with a thesis project entitled ‘A Social History of Medication Abortion: (Co)productions of Knowledge at the Crossroads of Medical, Militant and Lay Practices (1980-2020)’. 

Prof Isabel Amaral
WG1 Leader

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Isabel Amaral is Associate Professor with Habilitation at NOVA School of Science and Tecnhology’s Department of Applied Social Sciences and Ethics Council member. She trained in Biochemistry and holds a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science and a Habilitation in Modern History. Her research concerns the history of science, medicine and public health; the history of tropical medicine in imperial contexts; the medical press, and bioethics, with a focus on the Portuguese case within STM framework. She currently works on global health, the history of epidemics, and the Anthropocene. Within COST Action, she is leading WG 1 which deals with the history of health provision.

Dr Yuliya Hilevych
WG2 Leader

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Yuliya Hilevych is an Associate Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Groningen (NL). Her research expertise is in comparative histories of population, health, and welfare during the long 20th Century Europe. She holds BA and MA in Sociology from the University of Lviv (UKR), PhD from Wageningen University (NL), and she previously held positions at NIDI (NL), University of Cambridge (UK), and University of Lincoln (UK).

Dr Friederike Kind-Kovács
WG3 Leader

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Friederike Kind-Kovacs is a senior researcher at the Hannah Arendt Institute at TU Dresden and a lecturer at Regensburg University. She is a 20th century historian with a special interest in the transnational history of Central Europe and especially the history of childhood. She is the author of Budapest’s Children: Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great War (IUP 2022), Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (CEU, 2014), and co-author of The Wireless World: Global Histories of International Radio Broadcasting (OUP2022). She co-edited From the Midwife’s Bag to the Patient’s File: Public Health in Eastern Europe(CEU, 2017). In the COST-action she is leading working group 3 which deals with the history of patients. In her current research she is engaging with the history of Hungarian  child survivors in Sweden after 1945. 

Dr Sean Lucey
WG4 Leader

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Dr Seán Lucey is the Research Manager of the College of Business & Law, University College Cork. He has an academic and research profile in the history of healthcare in Ireland and Britain. He has multiple publications in these fields including a 2026 monograph entitled Healthcare in Northern Ireland, 1921-73: Policies, Politics and Management published by Manchester University Press.

Dr Verusca Calabria
WG5 Leader

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Verusca Calabria is an Associate Professor of Mental Health Histories at Nottingham Trent University. Verusca leads the EUROHealthHist Working Group 5 “Heritage and Public Engagement”. Her research focuses on coproduction of the social history and heritage of mental healthcare. She is committed to collaborative approaches that bring together academic, professional, and lived-experience perspectives to better understand mental health histories.

Prof Mojca Ramšak
WG 1 Co Lead

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Mojca Ramšak, Ph.D. in ethnology from the University of Ljubljana; Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Ljubljana and Professor of Anthropology at AMEU-ISH, Faculty for Postgraduate Studies in the Humanities. She is a researcher, postgraduate professor, and author who has published eleven scholarly monographs. Currently, she is leading large interdisciplinary project ‘Smell and Intangible Cultural Heritage’.

Her full bibliography is available at: https://bib.cobiss.net/bibliographies/si/webBiblio/bib201_20251028_135227_14974.html

Dr Agata Ignaciuk
WG 2 Co Lead

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Agata Ignaciuk is an Associate Professor at the Department of the History of Science, University of Granada (Spain). Her research focuses on gender and the history of sexual and reproductive health and rights from a transnational and comparative perspective

Dr Oana Valentina Sorescu-Iudean
WG 3 Co Lead

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Oana SORESCU-IUDEAN is a researcher at the Centre for Population Studies of the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. She has worked on various grants which employed digital humanities approaches to examine the social and economic history of East-Central between the 18th and early 20th century. Most recently, she has dealt with the impact of plague in urban Transylvania during the first half of the 18th century, as well as with the development of urban health infrastructures, emerging medicalization, and shifts in living conditions as evidenced in probate inventories and tax records. She is also a postdoctoral researcher within the framework of the ERC Grant “Transnational histories of ‘corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850)”. She is co-leader of WG 3.

Dr Gareth Millward
WG 4 Co Lead

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Gareth Millward is a British historian of medicine and welfare at the University of Southern Denmark. He has researched several aspects of state medical and public health policy, including resource allocation, disability, vaccination, and sickness regulations. He is a member of the Management Committee and co-lead of Working Group 4.

Dr Christina Malathouni
WG 5 Co Lead

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Dr Christina Malathouni is currently based at the School of Architecture, University of Liverpool (UK), holding an MSc and a PhD from The Bartlett, UCL (UK), and an Architecture degree from the School of Architecture, NTUA (Greece). She is a qualified architect and architectural historian with extensive experience in the heritage sector, specialising in 20th-century architectural heritage. Her research explores various associations between human nature and space and is currently focusing on historical perspectives of 20th-century healthcare architecture, including their heritage potential.