This blog follows the history of psychiatry

H-Madness is intended as a resource for scholars interested in the history of madness, mental illness and their treatment (including the history of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and clinical psychology and social work).  The chief goal is to provide a forum for researchers in the humanities and social sciences to exchange ideas and information about the historical study of mental health and mental illness.  The blog, therefore, primarily serves university and college faculty, students, and independent researchers.

Subscribers are encouraged to share information about teaching and research as well as news about professional activities and events, such as job postings, conferences, and fellowships and grants.  While most postings are in English, postings in other languages are welcome. The editors are:

Greg Eghigian is Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program and Associate Professor of Modern History and Science, Technology, and Society at Penn State University (USA).  He writes and teaches on the history of madness, mental illness, and mental health in the western world.  He is the co-editor and author of numerous books, most recently From Madness to Mental Health;  Psychiatric Disorder and its Treatment in Western Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 2010).(Penn State University)

Eric J. Engstrom works in the Department of History at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where he is a member of a federally funded research unit on “Cultures of Madness (1870-1930)”. He is also a consultant to the Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry in Munich and co-editor of the papers of the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. He has published numerous books and articles, mainly on the history of psychiatry in 19th and 20th century Germany.

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Andreas Killen is Associate Professor of History at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has held fellowships at the UCLA Humanities Consortium and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Among his publications are Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (University of California Press 2006) and a special volume of Osiris that he co-edited on the history of the human sciences. Currently he is working on a book about the relation between film and the human sciences in early 20th century Germany.

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Elizabeth Lunbeck is a historian of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She is the author of The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton 1994,  1996), and, with the psychoanalyst Bennett Simon, of  Family  Romance, Family Secrets (Yale 2003).  She has co-edited several additional volumes, most recently Histories of Scientific Observation, with Lorraine Daston (Chicago, 2010).  At present, she is completing The Americanization of Narcissism.  Grants and fellowships from  the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Institutes of  Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Charles Warren Center, among others, have funded her research and writing. Lunbeck is Nelson Tyrone, Jr Professor of History, and Professor of Psychiatry, at Vanderbilt.

Benoît Majerus is managing editor of the blog H-Madness and is Lecturer at the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). He is working on a history “from below” of twentieth-century psychiatry.

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Hans Pols is senior lecturer at the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He is interested in the history of psychiatry and the mental hygiene movement in North America and Europe, psychiatric war syndromes, and colonial psychiatry, in particular in the Dutch East Indies.

 
Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge. She has taught at Cambridge and Harvard, and recently spent a year conducting research in Paris in affiliation with the Centre Koyré d’histoire des sciences (EHESS). Her publications include an article on “automatic writing” in fin-de-siècle France and a piece on representations of “catalepsy” in the 19th-century medical imagination (2012).

To contact us: hpsychiatry@gmail.com