Dr. Katharina Seibert

The medical knowledge and techniques necessary to perform gender affirmative care was produced during the long 19th century in different contexts and was not intended to serve for this purpose. This study searches for actors who reinterpreted this body of knowledge and advanced it to today’s standards. But it also traces how the bodies of transgender people became,in this process,an arena for negotiating the line between reproduction of heterosexual femininity and masculinity and their subversions.

The 1930s and 1940s constituted a decisive period in Spanish contemporary history, in general, and its health care history, in particular. In only two decades an ambitious democratic project was launched, plunged into a bloody civil war, and replaced by an ultranationalist dictatorship. During these twenty years questions on the relation between state and citizens were raised with an unknown intensity. Health care was one arena where the negotiation of this relationship surfaced: defenders of the private practice system clashed with promoters of the first conceptions of a welfare state, secular nurses confronted the Catholic monopoly of care-work, physicians and surgeons defended what they considered hegemonic knowledge against rising new professions that stirred turmoil in the established medical labour division.

Approaching military health care and its administration during the Second Republic, the civil war and the first decade of the Francoist dictatorship from a gender historian’s perspective allows to shed light on several intersecting processes that prevailed in the Spanish society: the re-negotiation of labour division in medicine and health care which combined with a struggle for modernization of the field in general; gender relations that were set in motion; and the – at times very bloody and violent – competition for hegemony of different political projects for Spanish nationhood which would ultimately be won by the supporters of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Or to put in other words, while democrats defended the Republic at the sickbed, Francoists built there their vision of the “new” Spain. The civil war, therefore, will be interpreted as a part of a larger process of social transformation.

Although the Spanish case may seem from the outside different to the trajectories of its European neighbours, zooming in on this transformation shows, that European history of the interwar period condensed on the Peninsula.

• 2022: Austrian Marshall Plan Fellow at the Institute for European Studies, UC Berkeley
• 2021: George Watt Graduate Essay Preis of the Abraham-Lincoln-Brigade Archivs
• 2019-2022: Research Grant Uni:Docs, University of Vienna
• 2016/2017: Research Grant, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
• 2012: Research Grant, EVZ Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung, Zukunft: “Kriegsgefangenschaft und Heimkehr im europäischen Spielfilm nach dem Zeiten Weltkrieg“

• September 2023: PhD Award of the Society for the History of Sciences, Medicine and Technology (GWMT)
• November 2023: PhD Award of the Society for Women’s and Gender History (AKHFG)
• December 2023: Austrian Award of Excellence of the Republic of Austria

• Katharina Seibert: Who Cares? Negotiating Gender and Society at Spain's Sickbeds, 1930-1948, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2025.

• Katharina Seibert & Barnabas Balint: Rallying Europe. Intersectional Approaches to Youth and Gender in the Mid-Twentieth Century, European Review of History, 31 (3), 2024.

• Katharina Seibert: Health, Home and Hearth: How War Nurses Negotiated their Place at the Table During the Dawn of Francoist Spain, European Review of History, 31 (3), 2024: 492-515. https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2024.2325486

• Sarah Knoll & Katharina Seibert: To Help or Not to Help - Humanitarianism in the 20th Century, zeitgeschichte, 51 (3), 2024.

• Katharina Seibert: Springboards for Women's Careers. International Humanitarianism, the Spanish Civil War, and the Rise of Mercedes Milá Nolla, zeitgeschichte, 51 (3), 2024: 335-358.