Personen
Team
Lara Keuck
Lara Keuck graduated in molecular biomedicine at Bonn University in 2008, receiving a scholarship of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes throughout her studies. She then participated in a German-French PhD program in History, Philosophy, and Ethics of Medicine at the University Medical Center Mainz and the Philosophy Department of the École normale supérieure in Paris, and completed her dissertation Towards an Epistemology of Medical Classification Systems in 2012. Her research was awarded the 2012 Prize for Philosophy in Psychiatry of the German Association of Psychiatry DGPPN. In 2012–2015, she held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), and at the Institute of Philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin (HU Berlin), where she worked on a project on blurred boundaries, from which grew a book on vagueness in psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 2016). The ETH Zurich awarded her the prestigious Branco Weiss Fellowship in 2015. She used the funding to establish the junior research group “Learning from Alzheimer’s Disease: A History of Biomedical Models of Mental Illness”, which she led from 2015–2021 at the Department of History of HU Berlin. During this time, Lara Keuck was also a short-term visiting scholar at Princeton University, University of Exeter, and Université de Bordeaux. From 2021-2024, Lara Keuck lead an independent Max Planck Research Group on “Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences” at the MPIWG in Berlin. This group gave rise to several projects and working groups, including the open source Digital Humanities project Commoning Biomedicine that provides the first search engine for oral histories in biomedicine, and the working group “Validation and Regulation in the Health and Human Sciences” that Professor Keuck co-organized with Professor Angela Creager (History Department, Princeton University) with whom she is currently working on a collective volume.
In 2020, Lara Keuck was elected to Die Junge Akademie, the young academy of Leopoldina and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She co-founded the working group Engaged Science that explores the boundaries between academic research and forms of political engagement. She was the first member of a young academy who was elected into the board of ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, in 2022 (re-elected in 2024). ALLEA is a central organization in European policy advice, advocating for research integrity and inclusive and sustainable research environments.
Professor Keuck co-edits the Journal History of Science and Humanities / Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte. She is the Bielefeld representative of the PhilInBioMed network, and organizes in this realm together with her colleagues Marie Kaiser (Philosophy of Science, Bielefeld) and Thomas Pradeu (Bordeaux) the 5th Conference of the network that brings together philosophers, biologists and medics (30 Sep-2 Oct, ZiF Bielefeld). Professor Keuck has been an external member of PhD committees in Paris (Sorbonne and ENS), Oslo and Geneva, and is a collaborator on several international and interdisciplinary projects, for instance at the Université de Tours and at Medicinsk Museion at Copenhagen.
Teaching:
History and Philosophy of Medicine (more information)
Research interests:
- Disease classifications, uncertainty and fuzzy boundaries in medicine and psychiatry
- History and philosophy of science of methods in medical research - from animal models to registry studies
- Methods in the history and philosophy of life sciences and medicine - from historical epistemology to feminist Philosophy
Publications:
Here you will find an overview of my publications.
Daniel R. Friedrich
I started my academic journey by studying Philosophy and Physics at the University of Leipzig. After completing both subjects with a Magister Artium, I took the opportunity to take a detour into African Studies and Computer Science without aiming for a degree. Six months later, I started my doctoral thesis on the deliberative justification of solidarity-based healthcare, also at the University of Leipzig. At the same time, I became researcher at the Institute for Ethics, History and Philosophy of Medicine at the University of Münster. There I worked on topics such as prioritization in medicine, scientific-theoretical and ethical issues in modern neuroscience and psychiatry, the difference between scientific medicine and alternative and complementary approaches and the question of what medical necessity can and should mean.
At Bielefeld University my current working field is the Philosophy of Medicine, in which I focus on both scientific theory and normative issues. In addition, I take a historical perspective on questions of philosophy of medicine in order to contextualize them and also to better understand some of the motivations behind the medical status quo.
The question of the scientific nature of medicine is a focus of my research and teaching. I am particularly interested in the scientific paradigm and goal of the best explanation of phenomena, because this is also of importance for patient-centered medicine: only when complex disease phenomena can be explained as precisely and predictably as possible treatment methods can be developed that are helpful for patients in a targeted manner. If, on the other hand, diseases are insufficiently described, their successful treatment is firstly difficult to prove and secondly, if it succeeds anyway, it is more a case of luck than consciously brought about support. In this respect, it seems plausible to me that scientific orientation, i.e. orientation towards scientific procedures and findings, is one of the prerequisites for patient-centered medicine.
I am currently mostly interested in the following questions:
- What is the status of evidence-based medicine within the sciences?
- What makes medicine science-orientated in the above sense? How does it differ from a purely scientific discipline?
- What are the normative frameworks of medicine that can be used to justify interventions in patients and study participants?
- How can scientific accuracy and thoroughness be realized under conditions of urgency?
Gina Maria Klein
I have been a doctoral student and research assistant in the History and Philosophy of Medicine working group since the beginning of 2024. In my doctoral project, supervised by Prof. Dr. Lara Keuck, I am investigating knowledge about skin and skin care at the blurred boundary between beauty and health.
My research interest lies particularly in the historical exploration of the unclear boundary between personal acts of beauty care, hygiene, and medically necessary treatments of the skin. More generally, I am interested in the knowledge that underlies everyday practices and its distinction from "specialized knowledge", especially scientific knowledge.
After studying biology and history in Bielefeld (B.Sc.), I studied History, Economics, and Philosophy of Science / Interdisciplinary Studies of Science (M.A.) in Bielefeld and Vienna. In my master's thesis, I dealt with the history of industrial cosmetic products in the second half of the 20th century in West Germany.
Research interests
- History of medicine and hygiene
- History of the cosmetics industry
- History of everyday knowledge
- History of objects
- History of science in the 19th and 20th centuries
Friedrich Kleffmann
I hold a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg and a MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge, UK. Currently I pursue a degree in Medicine at the University of Leipzig. Since 2023 I am a research assistant in the AG History and Philosophy of Medicine
My academic field of interest is the Philosophy of Medicine and Psychiatry. I am especially interested in debates about legitimate and illegitimate roles of nonepistemic values in medical research and clinical practice. More specifically, my Master's thesis has focussed on this topic in relation to perverse financial incentives in the German DRG system of hospital reimbursement. Moreover, I am interested in philosophical questions around the development and application of clinical guidelines.
I am currently preparing for my MD dissertation here at the AG History and Philosophy of Medicine
Michele Lucchetti
Michele Luchetti is a postdoctoral researcher in the philosophy and history of science and medicine at the University of Bielefeld. He obtained a PhD in Philosophy from the Central European University in Budapest and held previous research positions at the University of Geneva and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He combines epistemological and historical insights to investigate issues related to measurement, conceptual change, and performative practices in science and medicine.
The project that he is currently developing focuses on the epistemological implications of how medical knowledge is performed, with a specific focus on the role of standardized patients (or "simulators") in medical education. In addition to his academic work, Michele is also a theatre practitioner and instructor, taking inspiration from the traditions of theatre anthropology and social theatre.
Sasha Bergstrom-Katz
Sasha Bergstrom-Katz is a Berlin-based artist, researcher and writer. Her interdisciplinary, practice-based projects focus on technologies, objects and concepts from the histories of human and medical sciences. She is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences Research Group at the MPIWG (until Aug. 2024). Her 2023 PhD thesis entitled On Intelligence Tests: Psychological Objects and Their Subjects makes an aesthetic enquiry into the material cultures and history of intelligence testing in the United States. Her current research extends this project to investigate the ways in which intelligence testing can be understood as “performing” science.
Bergstrom-Katz holds a PhD in Psychosocial Studies from Birkbeck, University of London and an MFA in Fine Art from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently co-editing a special issue of the History of Human Sciences entitled The Material Force of Categories with Tomas Percival and is also co-editor of the forthcoming volume Art & Psychotherapy alongside Dr. Sarah Marks and Dr. Suzanne Hudson. In 2022, she was an Artistic Fellow at BS-Projects, Hochschule für Bildende Künste