Dr Staffan Müller-Wille
Extension: 4340
Telephone: 01392 724340
Senior Lecturer
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 11am to 1pm, Amory Building, Room A225
For a full CV click here; for a full publication list here.
Staffan received his academic education at the universities of Kiel, Berlin (West) and Bielefeld. He held a research position at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science (Berlin) before he moved to the University of Exeter in 2004. He currently holds a joint position as lecturer in both the Department of Sociology and Philosophy and the Department of History, and is associated with the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis) and the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter.
Staffan's research is strongly interdisciplinary, moving back and forth between the history, philosophy and social studies of the life sciences. He has published extensively on the history of taxonomy, with a focus on the work of the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, and on the history of the concepts of heredity, gene, and race. Recent publications include:
- A Cultural History of Heredity (University of Chicago Press, 2012), a book co-authored with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger on the history of the concept of heredity since the late Middle Ages.
- Part Special Issue "Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Cell Biology", guest-edited with Maureen O'Malley for Studiesn in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Studies;
- Das Gen im Zeitalter der Postgenomik: Eine wissenschaftshistorische Bestandsaufnahme (Suhrkamp, edition unseld, 2009), a book co-authored with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger on the evolution of the gene concept; an English translation is currently being negotiated with Yale University Press;
- Musa cliffortiana/Cliffords Banana Plant (IAPT, 2007), an edition of a book published by Linnaeus in 1737; and
- Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture 1500-1870 (MIT Press, 2007), an essay volume co-edited with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger.
Staffan is Editor-in-Chief of the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, and a member of the editorial boards of Journal for the History of Biology and NTM -- Journal for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Arts and Humanities Research at the Natural History Museum (London) and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.
Research Projects:
Re-Writing the System of Nature: Linnaeus's Use of Writing Technologies (Funded by the Wellcome Trust)
Historisizing Knowledge about Human Biological Diversity in the 20th Century (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, berlin, 2011/12)
A Cultural History of Heredity (Funded by the Karl-Schaedler Foundation, British Academy, Wellcome Trust, and German Academic Exchange Service)
