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The
Humanities Center
Gilman 115
Johns Hopkins University
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
Phone: 410-516-7368
Fax: 410-516-4897
E-mail:leys@jhu.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Professor
Ruth Leys is Director of the Humanities
Center and 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, forthcoming winter 2007). She is presently
working on 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..
Her
teaching focuses on aspects of the history and theory of psychoanalysis;
the history of psychiatry; the history of the neurosciences; trauma theory;
the mind-body problem; and the history of approaches to the emotions.
Recent seminar topics include: Freud’s Moses; The Philosophy and Neurosciences of the
Emotions (with Professor Meredith Williams, Department of Philosophy);
Trauma Theory Now; Madness After Foucault; From Guilt to Shame; Trauma and
Testimony; Topics in Post-Holocaust Representation (with Professor
Gabrielle Spiegel, Department of History); Identification/Disidentification; Mind and Matter (with Professor
Paola Marrati).
Ruth Leys
has undertaken a variety of administrative duties at Johns Hopkins,
including serving for several years as the Executive Director of the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute.
Selected
Publications
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From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After
Ruth Leys
Princeton University
Press, forthcoming 2007
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From Sympathy to Reflex: Marshall Hall and His Critics
Ruth Leys
Garland
Publishing
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Defining American Psychology: The Correspondence Between
Adolf Meyer and Edward Bradford Titchener
Edited by Ruth Leys (with Rand B.Evans)
The Johns Hopkins
Press
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