Annelie DrakmanSenior lecturer, researcher
About me
My name is Annelie Drakman and my research clusters around two topics: disgusting things, and joy.
Since January 2020, I have been employed as a researcher and teacher at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University. Here, I teach the history of science and ideas, but mainly I work on the project Joy in Science – the Function of Positive Emotions in Auto-Biographies by Nobel Laureates in Physics, which is funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund), of which I am the PI.
I examine how expressions of joy are used by Nobel Laureates in physics to define research as an activity and the researcher as a person, mainly from 1945 onwards. I've published a bit in Swedish on this, not so much in English. But in August 2023, I published the article "The Seductive Scientist", on why Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and James Watson worked so hard to portray themselves as fun people. It can be read here (no paywall!):
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2023.0051?fbclid=IwAR2L0nQZ528v1cZBix9Yho2naXjn59aeb1smEmdaGkSUnKIcPAwEoUU68y8
I've taught at several universities in Sweden: The Karolinska Institute and at Lund University, but mainly at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala.
I have also been an invited speaker at several different Swedish universities: KTH (planned for January 2024), Södertörn, Uppsala, Stockholm, Umeå, Gothenburg, Lund.
I have also been invited to be a guest lecturer and teacher at Colby College in Maine and at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I've been invited to present my research at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Emotion in Berlin, Germany, at the Department for History of the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy; and at the Niels Bohr Institute (planned for April 2024).
I've been a visiting doctoral student and scholar at King's College London (sponsor: Ludmilla Jordanova), New York University (sponsor: Emily Martin) and Harvard University (sponsor: Steven Shapin).
The summer of 2022 was the first time my course "The history of joy" was given. It was also repeated in the summer of 2023, and will be given again in the summer of 2024. It attracted so much interest that fewer than 1/8 of the students who applied could be accepted.
In 2018, I was awarded my Ph.D. in the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University for a dissertation titled When the Body Closed and Became Firm: Why Bloodletting, the Miasmatic Theory and Climate Medicine were Abandoned in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Here I clarify how humoral pathology was much less influential during this century than is generally assumed. I also elucidate why bloodletting made complete sense as treatment if one considers contemporary perceptions of what created disease. These arguments are based on distant and close readings of 8800 annual reports written by Swedish provincial doctors 1820–1900. Furthermore, I show that the miasmatic theory (the idea that airborne decay caused epidemics) was an analogue problem to that medical issue bloodletting was meant to remedy: stagnant flows which caused decay, disease and death.
The main point is that doctors abandoned pre-bacteriological theories and practices long before bacteriology was established in the 1870s, since the doctors’ perceptions of how the body and its environment interacted changed dramatically. They abandoned the idea of a flowing, fragile body which was open to external influences and instead began to treat a closed, delimited body whose inner, reactive powers needed to be strengthened. Hence the title of the dissertation.
If you are interested and can read Swedish, the whole book can be downloaded for free here (it includes an extensive English summary):
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1195613&dswid=-5098
The dissertation was awarded the Carl Johan Association's prize for best historical work in 2019. Two articles stemming from it won second place in international essay competitions: The Shryock Medal Award 2018, awarded by The American Association of the History of Medicine, and the William Bynum Essay Prize 2017, awarded by the journal Medical History at Cambridge University Press.
http://www.histmed.org/past-shryock-medal-winners
If you are interested in contagion, leeches, putrefaction, or in scientific autobiographies, the history of emotion or the pursuit of fun, you are more than welcome to get in touch with me by emailing
annelie.drakman@idehist.su.se
