Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Post-Doc, Department II 'Ideals and Practices of Rationality'

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

About

I graduated from the Institut d'Études Politiques of Paris (‘Sciences Po’, France) with an M.A. in History, Economy, and Political Studies. I then defended a PhD thesis in History at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris). A former Lavoisier scholar at the University of Oxford, I also studied at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge (UK). I am now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, Germany).

Prior to my coming to Berlin, I worked as a junior Lecturer in Modern History at the EHESS (Paris) for two years. I also taught 'History of Psychology' at the University of Paris V and supervised students for courses in ‘History of Psychiatry’ at the University of Cambridge.

My main research interest is the History of Medicine and Psychiatry (19th-20th c.). My PhD thesis (soon to be published) highlighted the role played by patients in the evolution of medical discourses and public perceptions of insanity in 19th century-France. It revealed that there existed an 'anti-alienist' discourse long before the 1970s anti-psychiatry (thus distorting the Foucaldian image of the omnipotent ‘psychiatric power’). Recently, I became interested in the history of women's criminality and female sexual deviance. I seek to write a history of female violence, examining how scientific assumptions on the ‘weaker sex’ led to the obliteration of female crimes in the modern period.

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