The European Histories of HIV/AIDS

Presentation of the symposium, the network, email-list, website and ambitions for funding.

This session explores how HIV/AIDS intersected with racialisation, migration, and diasporic belonging in late 20th-century Europe. With case studies from the UK and France, the presentations examine how Black and migrant communities were both pathologised and mobilised, and how racial inequality shaped access to healthcare, activism, and public memory.

1. Nikolaos Papadogiannis (University of Stirling): HIV and AIDS campaigns, religious practices and Black African communities in the UK, 1996-2008
2. Somak Biswas (University of Cambridge): AIDS and Immigration in Late 20th-century Britain
3. Christophe Broqua (Institut des mondes africains): Inequality and competition between social memories related to HIV/AIDS in France
4. George Severs (Geneva Graduate Institute): HIV/AIDS activism in England

What happens when activism meets nationalism, state bureaucracy, and post-socialist transformation? This session brings together work on Latvia, Norway, and Denmark to investigate how the AIDS crisis became a site for negotiating political identity, institutional collaboration, and the terms of national belonging.

1. Siobhan Hearne (University of Manchester): Fighting AIDS and Returning to Europe: AIDS Activism and the Latvian Independence Movement in the Late Soviet Union.
2. Michael Nebeling (University of Copenhagen): Welfare homosexualities: HIV/AIDS, Racialization, and the Roots of Scandinavian Homonationalism
3. Ketil Slagsted (Institute of the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité Berlin): Amphibious Activism: Crossing Boundaries between Subcultures and State Bureaucracy in the Norwegian AIDS Crisis

This session examines the diverse ways HIV/AIDS unfolded across national and regional contexts. The papers address how media, political decentralisation, gender, and social difference shaped epidemic responses and public understanding in Britain, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Denmark.

1. Lola Dickinson (Birkbeck, University of London): Britain’s Multiple Epidemic: Drug use, Sex Work and HIV across the 1980s and early 1990s
2. Marco Rovinello (Contemporary History, Università della Calabria): A Media Epidemic: HIV/AIDS Coverage in Italy, 1980s-2010s
3. Maja Lukanc (Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana): Unknowns, misunderstandings, and politicisation in the early response to HIV and AIDS in socialist Slovenia and Yugoslavia
4. Camilla Bruun Eriksen (University of Copenhagen): Women and AIDS.

Why are some voices missing from the archives and cultural narratives of HIV/AIDS? This session looks at silence as both a political condition and an analytical category, exploring what is lost, withheld, or actively erased from the record – across post-Soviet spaces, Poland, and European-level activism.

1. Ekaterina Suverina (Universität Konstanz): The Voices We Can’t Hear: Archiving HIV and Drug Activism in Post-Soviet Spaces.
2. Agata Dziuban (University in Krakow) and Todd Sekuler (Universität Zürich): The Politics of Absence: Withholding and withdrawing stories from the European HIV/AIDS Archive.
3. Dorota Sosnowska (Uniwersytet Warszawski): The (non)representation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Polish culture.

This session explores how literary texts, life writing, and cultural representations have grappled with the affective, social and political complexities of HIV/AIDS. From Denmark and Spain to Russia and the Netherlands, the papers reflect on the symbolic, narrative and archival roles of literature in epidemic histories.

1. Alvaro Gonzalez Montero (University of Leeds): Making history through life-writing: the early years of HIV/AIDS in Spain (1985-1993)
2. Alexander Meienberger (University of St. Gallen): Sickness and Silence: HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and the Limits of Cultural Representation in Russia
3. Mons Bissenbakker (University of Copenhagen): Danish AIDS literature
4. Jesse van Amelsvoort (University of Amsterdam): The Curious Disappearance of Dutch AIDS Fiction

Conversation with Danish activists and HIV/AIDS organisations (to be arranged).
Confirmed participants: Mads Staugård Senior (Aids-foundation), Ole Morten Nygård (activist) and Nikolaj Tange Lange (author)

1. Agata Dziuban (University of Krakow) and Todd Sekuler (Universität Zürich): Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health (HERA funded)
2. Moises Fernandez Cano and Nikolaos Papadogiannis (University of Stirling): AIDS Campaigning between the Global South and Western Europe since the 1980s (Medical Research Council, UK research and innovation)
3. Michael Nebeling Petersen: The Cultural History of AIDS in Denmark (Independent Research Fund Denmark)

Paths to funding

Presentation and discussions with a person from the administrative funding support unit