- 8 February 2023
- Etichete ICR LONDRA ROMANI INSPIRATI INSPIRATII IN ALBION
The Romanian Cultural Institute in London launches, on February 14th, the new series ”Inspired Romanians & Romanian Inspirations in the Albion", dedicated to Romanian personalities risen and recognized in Great Britain in fields of great importance. Periodically, one such personality will be invited at RCI London in a meeting with the public, the themes covering a broad spectrum, from art to scientific research and from literature to medicine.
The first event of the series hosts Marius Turda, Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, who will talk about eugenics.
When hearing about eugenics people often become alarmed and distraught. Justifiably so! The historical facts lend themselves to this reaction. In the name of eugenics, hundreds of thousands of people were institutionalised and sterilized, euthanasia was performed on children with disabilities, and unethical human experiments were conducted in Nazi concentration camps. At the same time, sexual minorities were targeted, and their lives constantly supervised. Socially disadvantaged people were believed to be ‘defective’ and ‘unfit’. They were described as biologically ‘unworthy’ of reproduction. And any inventory of the abusive acts committed in the name of eugenics would be incomplete without mentioning indigenous peoples across the world who were subjected to humiliating racial research to evidence their assumed ‘inferiority’, a practice also extended to ethnic minorities in Europe such as the Roma. Therefore, one should not treat eugenics as an 'anomaly'. It was no deviation from the scientific norm, nor a distorted version of a crude social Darwinism that found its culmination in fascism and Nazi policies of genocide. It was an integral aspect of global modernity in the twentieth century, one in which the state and the individual embarked on an unprecedented quest to create an idealised future offered by the promises of evolutionary science.
Marius Turda is a British-Romanian historian. Originally from Maramures, Marius has lived in the UK for more than 20 years. He is Professor and Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University, having previously taught at UCL and the University of Oxford. He is the founding director of the Cantemir Institute at the University of Oxford (2012-13) and founder of the Working Group in the History of Race and Eugenics (2006). In 2020, he established Romania's first Centre for the History of Eugenics and Racism at the Institute of History 'G. Baritiu' in Cluj. He has authored, co-authored and edited more than 25 books on the history of eugenics, race, and racism in East-Central Europe and beyond. He is the General Editor of Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Race (2021). Between 2018 and 2022, he also curated four exhibitions on eugenics, racial anthropology and biopolitics. He was one of the main consultants for the acclaimed BBC documentary ‘Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal’ (2019). His most recent public engagement project is www.confront-eugenics.org
