Dr. Alfred Freeborn
Contact
Email: alfred.freeborn@uni-bielefeld.de
Room: X A4-240
Address:
Department of Philosophy
Bielefeld University
P.O. Box 100131
D- 33501 Bielefeld
Research interests
Dr. Alfred Freeborn is a historian of science and medicine whose research focuses on late-modern biological psychiatry. His work combines archival research, oral history and epistemological analysis to explain the nature of scientific progress in psychiatry over the twentieth-century. His current project is entitled Spectrum Politics: Making and Resisting Medical Collectives in the Era of Big Data and charts the rise of the spectrum concept in modern medicine from the perspectives of intellectual, social and political history.
Teaching
Alfred has taught courses on the history of psychiatry, big data and artificial intelligence at Birkbeck University of London, Humboldt University and Bard College Berlin.
Short CV
Alfred received his BA in History and MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, before completing a doctorate at the Chair for the History of Science at the Humboldt University. He was a Research Scholar in the Research Group on Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences (Lara Keuck) and Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life (Etienne Benson) at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. In 2024, he received the Early Career Prize of the History of the Human Sciences journal for his work on postwar methodological reforms in psychiatric diagnosis.
Publications
Together with Elizabeth Hughes, he was co-editer of the volume Biomedical Visions: Epistemology, Medicine and Art Practice (2025) published with Hatje Cantz. He recently co-edited a forthcoming Special Issue on Research Interviews in the History of Science for the Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte with Dr Hanna Worliczek.