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Professor Paolo Palladino

Professor of History and Theory

Degree: A.B. (Columbia); Ph.D. (Minnesota)

Current Teaching

My current teaching focuses on both the role of the life sciences and medicine in modern bio-political governmental mechanisms and the nature of historical explanation (HIST260; HIST274; HIST275; HIST411). I also convene a Special Study Module on Medicine, Life and Death.

Research Interests

I am intrigued by the notion that the contemporary development of the biomedical sciences marks a profound historical rupture. I am attempting to interrogate this notion by extending my previous work on the history of genetics to encompass the contemporary biomedical reconfiguration of ageing and the passage of time (partly in collaboration with Tiago Moreira). I am also exploring the manifold philosophical implications of this notion by participating in the Reading Group (the current core members of the group are Arthur Bradley, Bulent Diken, Michael Dillon and Charlie Gere). At the same time, I find myself drawn back repeatedly to revisit my earliest work on the relationship between the lives of humans and the lives of insects.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

History of the medical and human sciences; history of the environmental sciences, agriculture and the environment; the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze.

Current supervision:

Dee Leahy (Sociology), 'The Invention of Epilepsy'. (Co-supervised with Adrian Mackenzie). Drawing on Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter, Dee explores the scientific understanding of epilepsy which emerged at the end of the 19th c. and how it continues to shape the development of the neurosciences.

Former students:

Piers Hale (University of Oklahoma), 'William Morris, Edward Carpenter and Robert Blatchford on labour, nature and the body' (2003).

Publications

Works in Progress

• 'Biopolitics between History and Philosophy'.
• 'On the Beach: Agamben, Foucault and Deleuze'.
• On the Beach: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on the Biology of Ageing and Death.

Books

• Plants, Patients and the Historian: (Re)Membering in the Age of Genetic Engineering (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
• Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture: The Making of Scientific Careers in North America, 1885-1985 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 1996).

Recent Articles and Chapters in Books

• 'Overcoming the Onto-Theology of the Body?', Body & Society (forthcoming).
• With T. Moreira, 'La Biogerontologie comme Critique de la Biomedicine', in B. Fantini (ed.), Histoire de la Pensee Medicale Contemporaine (Paris: Seuil, forthcoming).
• With T. Moreira, 'Questions of Life and Death: A Genealogy', in B. S. Turner (ed.), Handbook of Body Studies (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 362-74.
• 'Miranda's Story: Molecules, Populations and the Mortal Organism', History of the Human Sciences 24 (2011), 1-20.
• With T. Moreira, "Population Laboratories' or 'Laboratory Populations'? Making Sense of Diversity in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, 1965-1987', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (2011), 317-327.
• 'Picturing the Messianic: Agamben and Titian's The Nymph and the Shepherd', Theory, Culture & Society 27 (2010), 94-109.
• With T. Moreira, 'Ageing between Gerontology and Biomedicine', BioSocieties 4 (2009), 349-65.
• 'Ginzburg in Harlem: History, Structure and the Politics of Primitivism', Culture, Theory and Critique 49 (2008), 203-17.
• 'Revisiting Franco's Death: Life, Death and Biopolitical Governmentality', in M. Dillon & A. Neal (eds.), Foucault on Politics, Security and War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 115-31.

Professional Roles

Member of the editorial board of Culture Frame and Rethinking History; member of the editorial advisory board of Journal of Historical Sociology.

Associated Keywords: Agamben, Ageing, Biopolitics, Canguilhem, Death, Deleuze, Foucault, History, Medicine, Philosophy, Political theory, War

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