Heredity
Staffan Müller-Wille
Senior LecturerStaffan 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:
- Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture 1500-1870 (MIT Press, 2007), an essay volume co-edited with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger;
- Musa cliffortiana/Cliffords Banana Plant (IAPT, 2007), an edition of a book published by Linnaeus in 1737; and
- Vererbung: Geschichte und Kultur eines biologischen Konzepts (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009), a book co-authored with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger on the history and culture of the concept of heredity, which will be translated into English for University of Chicago Press.
- 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..
Staffan is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.
Other Research Projects:
Re-Writing the System of Nature: Linnaeus's Use of Writing Technologies (Funded by the Wellcome Trust).
Biography
Staffan completed an MSc in geology and paleontology at the Free University Berlin in 1992. After short term projects in molecular biology (Université Paris XII) and marine geology (North-Atlantic Expedition 21 of FS Meteor), a PhD studentship at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies of the University of Bielefeld allowed him to move into history and philosophy of science. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Bielefeld in 1997 with a dissertation on Linnaeus and the Natural System, which was published as a book in 1999. Staffan left academia for a while in 1998 to work as a scientific curator at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. Staffan was part of a team responsible for setting up a new permanent exhibition on “Der Mensch (The Human Being).”
In December 2000, Staffan was appointed resident research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. In close collaboration with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, he developed a long term research project on the cultural history of heredity. A series of international workshops was organized that covered the topic from the early 16th to the late 19th century. In addition, Staffan taught at the Technical University of Berlin and held short term lectureships at the universities of Mexico City and Tel Aviv (Silverman Lectureship).
In October 2004, Staffan was appointed AHRC research fellow in philosophy of biology at the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis) of the University of Exeter. He continued his research on heredity, pursuing the history of the concept into the 20th century. In 2007, he co-edited an essay collection with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger covering the history of heredity up to 1870. A book summarizing the results from the project for a broad audience was published in German in 2009.
With the end of his research project, Staffan took up a joint position as lecturer in the Department of History and the Department of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He remains associated with Egenis, and has also established a close connection with the Centre for Medical History. From October 2008 to January 2009, Staffan was a guest scholar in Lorraine Daston's department at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science (Dept. Datson). He held short term research fellowships at the Maison de l'Homme, Paris, in 2005 and the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, Minneapolis, in 2007.
Staffan served as programme officer in 2005-2007 for the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, and is currently Council Member of the British Society for the History of Science. He is Associate Editor of Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, as well as Editorial Board Member of Endeavour, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, and NTM-Journal for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.