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Prof. Dr. phil. Staffan Müller-Wille

Research

In his research, Staffan Müller-Wille combines questions of epistemology with carefully considered historical case studies on the history of science, technology and medicine. He is currently working on two projects, all of which revolve in one way or another around the role of classification in the life sciences, including medicine and anthropology. Two topics currently define his research profile:

  1. History and philosophy of modern systematics:
    Systematics deals with the description, naming and classification of organisms, and is currently regaining prominence in life science discussions under the heading of “biodiversity”. However, in contrast to the experimental disciplines, its history and philosophy have been scarcely studied. The project “Re-writing the System of Nature”, funded by the Wellcome Trust from 2008 to 2012, was dedicated to this topic and investigated the paper-based methods used by the Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) to record the diversity of plants. Questions from this project were further pursued for the period after Linnaeus up to around the middle of the 19th century in collaboration with the “Historisizing Big Data” working group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the “Data Science” research project at the University of Exeter's Egenis Research Centre. More recently, this has led to an interest in the role of indigenous knowledge in natural history, which is being explored in an AHRC funded project on “Natural History in the Age of Revolutions, 1776–1848”, a research group at Cambridge on "Science and Its Others: Histories of Ethnoscience", and a project on Carl Linnaeus’s journey to Lapland (1732).
     
  2. Cultural History of Heredity and Kinship:
    From 2001 to 2011, the “Cultural History of Inheritance” project investigated the political, medical and technological contexts from which the modern concept of inheritance arose and on which it in turn had an influence. The results are now available in a book co-authored with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Vererbung. Geschichte und Kultur eines biologischen Konzepts, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 2009). Research in this area was pursued in the context of the research group “Kinship and Politics” at the Centre for Interdiscipilinary Research, Bielefeld (2017) and the Swiss National Foundation Synergeia Project “In the Shadow of the Tree: The Diagrammatics of Relatedness as Scientific, Scholarly, and Popular Practice“ (2019–2024).
     

More information on ongoing research and a complete list of publications can be found here.