Ruth Leys

Professor Ruth Leys is Professor of Humanities, with a joint appointment in the Department of History. Trained in the physiological and psychological sciences at Oxford University, she went on to receive her doctoral dissertation in the History of Science at Harvard University at a time when the work of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault were beginning to have an impact, which is to say, at a time when the field of the history of science and medicine was starting to develop ways to think more thoughtfully about its theoretical and methodological assumptions. The writings of Jacques Derrida have also been an important influence on her work.

Throughout her career she has been interested in different aspects of the history of the life sciences, especially the neurosciences, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry. She has analyzed the early history of the reflex concept, a defining concept for the modern neurosciences (From Sympathy to Reflex: Marshall and His Critics). She has edited what is arguably the most important correspondence between the two leading figures in twentieth-century American psychiatry and psychology, Adolf Meyer and Edward Bradford Titchener (Defining American Psychology: The Correspondence Between Adolf Meyer and Edward Bradford Titchener). She has critically examined the history of the modern concept of psychic trauma from its origins in the work of Freud to recent discussions by Shoshana Felman, Cathy Caruth, and others (Trauma: A Genealogy). She has explored the post-World War II vicissitudes of the concept of “survivor guilt”and its recent displacement by notions of shame, focusing on the recent contributions to shame theory by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Giorgio Agamben, and others (From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After). Her recent work is a book on the post-war history of experimental and theoretical approaches to the study of the emotions, with a special emphasis on the philosophical issues at stake in the competing cognitivist and neo-Darwinian paradigms of the emotions.