Professor Dan Healey

I have long been fascinated by the social and cultural history of modern Russia and the Soviet Union. My primary publications focused on the history of sexualities and gender in modernising Russia and the Soviet republics, with a particular interest in the role of medicine and law in shaping how sexuality and gender were regulated. I have explored the history of homosexuality in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the nature of masculinity under socialism, the problems of sexual disorder and sexual revolutions, and more recently the Soviet Gulag and the medical professionals who served in Stalin’s labour camps.

My published work in these areas includes the books Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago, 2001); Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (DeKalb, 2009) reissued as a paperback, 2022; and Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (London 2017). I co-edited Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (Basingstoke 2002) with Rebecca Friedman and Barbara Evans Clements. With Frances L. Bernstein and Christopher Burton, I co-edited Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice, Science (DeKalb, 2010).

My latest book, The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps (London, 2024), explores the medical system in the Stalin-era Gulag. The labour camps exploited prisoners, bringing them to the edge of exhaustion, illness, and death. Paradoxically the Gulag Sanitary Department employed 10,000 doctors, nurses, and paramedics to treat prisoners. Through the biographies of these medical professionals, I probe the limits of the medical care they could offer and argue that labour camp medicine remains a touchstone in Russian memory of the building of Gulag cities.

I am currently learning Georgian in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and hope to begin historical research projects working with Georgian archives.