Susan Solomon

One focus of Susan Solomon's scholarly work has been the transnational history of health and medicine (France – USSR; USSR -Germany; U.S-USSR). In 1994, she launched an international network of scholars focusing on German-Russian medical relations in the interwar-period. Seven years of annual meetings in Berlin culminated in an edited book, Doing medicine together- German-Russian Medical Relations Between the Wars (University of Toronto Press, 2008).

More recent publications include Shifting Boundaries of Public Health: Europe in the Twentieth Century (2008) edited with Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman; “Dangerous Play: Go-Betweens and Borders in Inter-War Public Health, Revue d’etudes comparatives est-ouest (2018); “East European Public Health and the Cold War: In Search of Circulation,” in The Postcommunist World in the Twenty-First Century:  How the Past Informs the Present, edited by Linda Cook and Barbara Chotiner (2022). 

In 2012, she wrote and co-directed with Thomas Lahusen (Chemodan Films) a documentary film entitled “In Search of Roubakine.” The film, which follows a 20^th century Russian émigré physician whose world was the no-man’s land between Soviet Russia and France, was shown inter alia at the Solzhenitsyn Festival in Moscow.  

In the last decade, she has been working on war trauma in French child psychiatry, 1945-1960. Among her publications are “Patient dossiers and clinical practice in 1950s French child psychiatry” Revue d’histoire de l’enfance irregulière (2016); “Secondary Silencing” and Transmission: Child Survivors of the Shoah raised in Jewish children’s homes in post-1945 France,” in Enfants “sans familles” dans les conflits du 20ème siècle, ed. Antoine Rivière, Laura Hobson Faure et Manon Pignot (Editions CNRS, 2023). In addition to her scholarly research on the subject, she is currently co-directing (with Amelie Mutabarayire Schafer, a Rwandan-born psychotherapist living in France) a documentary film Après Coup which centers on a dialogue between 3 orphans of the deportation of Jews from France in 1942 and 3 refugees of the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda.