My dissertation explores eighteenth-century bathing architecture in Eastern Europe and its impact across the continent. During this period, the region witnessed unprecedented developments in hygiene infrastructure, thanks to a network of artists active in Russia, Poland-Lithuania, and Habsburg Empire. Eastern European baths, whose forms and functions simultaneously evoked Ottoman and Graeco-Roman counterparts, reveal the ideological tensions that surfaced within Russian and Polish-Lithuanian societies as they negotiated their fluctuating positions between the Orient and the Occident. Based on the close study of drawings, structures, and their reception, my analysis of this little acknowledged contribution will shed light on the emergence of the modern concept of hygiene and the new bodily models it generated.

Link: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9210-0134