Katja Guenther specializes in the history of modern medicine and the mind sciences. She is a trained doctor (M.D., University of Cologne) who has worked in hospitals in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, and holds a research degree in neuroscience (M.Sc., Oxford University). She embarked on the study of the history of science and medicine at Harvard University before coming to Princeton on the completion of her Ph.D. in 2009. Her work has been funded by the ACLS/ Mellon Foundation, the Krupp Foundation, the Medical Research Council, and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.
Professor Guenther’s research focuses on the history of subjectivity and the ways in which modern ideas of the self have been constituted through the interplay of cultural and scientific norms. Her dissertation, “A Body Made of Nerves – Reflexes, Body Maps, and the Limits of the Self in Modern German Medicine” shows how the nineteenth-century neurological emphasis on the whole nervous system, rather than just the brain, and the reflex theory upon which the study of the nervous system was based, provided resources for a theory of subjectivity that both challenged rationalist views of a unified subject and served to integrate the body into theories of the self. In her work, Professor Guenther places the history of psychiatry into the context of neighboring disciplines. Taking into account the clinical and basic mind sciences, as well as contemporary biology, she explores how sensory-motor physiologists imagined the nervous system as a cooperative society of semi-autonomous elements that worked together for the common good of the organism. She is currently revising her dissertation for publication as a book.
