Skip to content
Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino
Visiting Fellowship 2025/26

Dr. José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas, PhD

Postdoctoral researcher
Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic.

Visiting Fellowship 2025/26 (1-15 June 2026)

José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas (Granada, 1992) is a historian of modern Europe. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences, in Prague. In 2022, he obtained a PhD at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. He has enjoyed fellowships in European instituitons such as the Masaryk University of Brno, the Technical Univeristy of Berlin, the Central European University, the Stiftung Ettersberg or the Jagellonian Univesity of Krakow. His research focuses on the comparative and transnational history of tourism and science in southern and east-central Europe. His work has appeared in jour- nals such as Contemporary European History, The History of the Family, German History, History of Science or Medical History. He is the author of three monographs, the most recent of which is Escribir historia después de Hitler: Historiografía y política en Alemania (1945–2022).

Statement of interest

During my visiting fellowship, I will further develop my current project on the history of healthcare experts in postwar Europe from a transnational perspective. The project explores both theoretical and practical developments in postwar healthcare, focusing on medical doctors, but also psychologists and sociologists who played a crucial role in shaping postwar healthcare regimes, which had a strong social dimension. The research stay at the Institute will allow me to broaden the scope of my work to include other territories of East-Central and South-Eastern Europe, with the aim of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of how healthcare was conceived and developed across different countries of postwar Europe.

I will use the fellowship to foster cooperation between the Institute of Contemporary History and the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In more specific terms, I will be working on a paper about the transnational making of postwar “social medicine,” arguing that the concept, widely used in both Eastern and Western Europe, had its origins in socialist countries.

Selected publications

  • Aguilar López-Barajas JL. (2025) The Doctors and the Party: Medicine, Politics, and the Habitus of Socialist Experts in the German Democratic Republic.Central European History. Published online: 1-18. doi:10.1017/S0008938925101192
  • Aguilar López-Barajas, J. L. (2025). The Anticolonial Moment and the Global Influence of the Leipzig School: A Sociology of Cold War Intellectual History.Global Intellectual History, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2025.2546862
  • Gagyiova, A., & Aguilar López-Barajas, J. L. (2024). School maturity and the quest for normalcy: how parental complaints shaped expertise and state policies in socialist Hungary and East Germany, 1960s-1980s.The History of the Family, 29(3), 393–417. https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2024.2369524
  • Aguilar López-Barajas JL. (2024) How Transnational Exchanges Shaped Conceptions about Morality and Small Nations in Europe: Catalan (and Spanish) Readings of Václav Havel in the 1990s.Contemporary European History;33(4):1384-1397. doi:10.1017/S0960777323000449
  • Lišková, K., Jarska, N., Gagyiova, A., Aguilar López-Barajas, J. L., & Rábová, Š. C. (2024). Saving newborns, defining livebirth: The struggle to reduce infant mortality in East-Central Europe in comparative and transnational perspectives, 1945–1965.History of Science, 62(2), 252-279. https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753231187486
E-mail:
jaguil04@ucm.es