Emese Lafferton

She is a historian of science, medicine, and technology, offering courses at CEU on a range of topics at the intersection of science, race, and gender. In the decade prior to joining CEU, she taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh in the United Kingdom and held prestigious research fellowships at several European and North American academic institutions, including the Wellcome Trust, Marie Curie, Fulbright, and the Carnegie Trust.

Her general research interests include the history of the life sciences, psychiatry, eugenics, racial thinking, evolutionary and hereditary theories, physical anthropology, and ethnography; the history of science, empire, and nationalism; and the history and sociology of medicine. More specifically, she explores the idiosyncratic features of medical and scientific traditions in non-Western, multinational empires—such as Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire—during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, situating them within a comparative, broader European and global framework. In this context, she organized the international workshop “The History of Science, Race and Empire in Central and Eastern Europe” at CEU (21–22 February 2014). Parts of its materials were published in Race, Science and Medicine in Central and Eastern Europe around 1900, edited by Emese Lafferton (Brill, East Central Europe, vol. 43, nos. 1–2, 2016).

Her teaching experience encompasses the history of science; the comprehensive history of medicine in Western society from antiquity to the present; the history of psychiatry; gender, science, and technology; medical sociology; and the history of the body. She currently offers courses cross-listed between the History and Gender Studies departments, including Race and Science (a critical approach to the role of the natural and social sciences in the construction of racial categories and theories), Making of the Modern Body (examining how the modern world reshaped everyday bodily experience and concepts of the body), and Women, Medicine, and Science (exploring their intersections from historical and sociological perspectives). Central to her research and teaching are the application of contemporary analytical methodologies in the history of science, the placement of scientific knowledge within its broader social, political, and cultural contexts, and the use of comparative perspectives.