Richard C. Keller

My research is aligned on three major axes. First, I have published widely on the implications of psychiatric theories of race for European colonial rule as well as postcolonial migration and citizenship. A second axis is the investigation of disaster mortality and public health crisis in contemporary Europe and the United States. Third, I am at the beginning stages of examining the entwined ecologies of Lyme Disease and HIV/AIDS in the United States.

Education

Ph.D., Rutgers University, History, 2001
M.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, History, 1996
B.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, History, 1992

Books

Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003

Richard C. Keller. Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Book Award, 2015 In a cemetery on the southern outskirts of Paris lie the bodies of nearly a hundred of what some have called the first casualties of global climate change. They were the so-called abandoned victims of the worst natural disaster in French history, the devastating heat wave that struck in August 2003, leaving 15,000 dead. They died alone in Paris and its suburbs, and were then buried at public expense, their bodies unclaimed. They died, and to a great extent lived, unnoticed by their neighbors–their bodies undiscovered in some cases until weeks after their deaths. Fatal Isolation tells the stories of these victims and the catastrophe that took their lives. It explores the multiple narratives of disaster–the official story of the crisis and its aftermath, as presented by the media and the state; the life stories of the individual victims, which both illuminate and challenge the ways we typically perceive natural disasters; and the scientific understandings of disaster and its management. Fatal Isolation is both a social history of risk and vulnerability in the urban landscape and a story of how a city copes with emerging threats and sudden, dramatic change.

Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties

Warwick Anderson (Co-editor), Deborah Jenson (Co-editor), and Richard C. Keller (Co-editor). Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties. Duke University Press, 2011.

By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European and North American ideas about the colonial world and the character and potential of native cultures. Psychoanalytic discourse, from Freud’s description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” to his conceptualization of primitive societies and the origins of civilization, became inextricable from the ideologies underlying European expansionism. But as it was adapted in the colonies and then the postcolonies, psychoanalysis proved surprisingly useful for theorizing anticolonialism and postcolonial trauma. Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is colonial and psychoanalytic, but, until now, this intersection has scarcely been explored, much less examined in comparative perspective. Taking on that project, Unconscious Dominions assembles essays based on research in Australia, Brazil, France, Haiti, and Indonesia, as well as India, North Africa, and West Africa. Even as they reveal the modern psychoanalytic subject as constitutively colonial, they shed new light on how that subject went global: how people around the world came to recognize the hybrid configuration of unconscious, ego, and superego in themselves and others. Contributors Warwick Anderson Alice Bullard John Cash Joy Damousi Didier Fassin Christiane Hartnack Deborah Jenson Richard C. Keller Ranjana Khanna Mariano Plotkin Hans Pols

Enregistrer les morts, identifier les surmortalités Une comparaison Angleterre, États-Unis et France

Richard C. Keller (Editor), Robert Dingwall (Editor), and Carine Vassy (Editor). Enregistrer Les Morts, Identifier Les surmortalités Une Comparaison Angleterre, États-Unis Et France. Presses de l’EHESP, l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Santé Publique, 2010.

La canicule de 2003, qui a tué 15 000 personnes en France sans que cette surmortalité ait été identifiée rapidement, a suscité des interrogations sur la capacité des pouvoirs publics à dénombrer les morts avec exactitude, à détecter les crises sanitaires et à prévenir l’apparition de drames semblables. Comment enregistre-t-on les morts ? Quelles sont les informations que l’on cherche ainsi à obtenir et dans quels buts ?Pour répondre à ces questions, qui se posent dans tous les pays industrialisés, quatre sociologues et un historien se sont intéressés aux modalités d’enregistrement de la mortalité en Angleterre, aux États-Unis et en France. Leur étude montre que ces modalités reflètent des choix de société, plus ou moins anciens, qui diffèrent d’un pays à l’autre. Pourquoi les Français sont-ils obsédés par la confidentialité des causes de la mort ? Pourquoi les Anglais pratiquent-ils vingt fois plus d’autopsies qu’en France ? Comment les Américains inscrivent-ils l’enregistrement des morts dans la lutte contre le terrorisme ? En principe, les trois pays produisent des données de mortalité similaires, susceptibles de faire l’objet de comparaisons internationales. En pratique, les modes de construction de l’information sont très variables, et les préoccupations de santé publique sont loin d’être prioritaires.

Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa

Richard C. Keller. Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Nineteenth-century French writers and travelers imagined Muslim colonies in North Africa to be realms of savage violence, lurid sexuality, and primitive madness. Colonial Madness traces the genealogy and development of this idea from the beginnings of colonial expansion to the present, revealing the ways in which psychiatry has been at once a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism, an innovative branch of medical science, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship. Drawing from extensive archival research and fieldwork in France and North Africa, Richard Keller offers much more than a history of colonial psychology. Colonial Madness explores the notion of what French thinkers saw as an inherent mental, intellectual, and behavioral rift marked by the Mediterranean, as well as the idea of the colonies as an experimental space freed from the limitations of metropolitan society and reason. These ideas have modern relevance, Keller argues, reflected in French thought about race and debates over immigration and France’s postcolonial legacy.

Selected Publications

• Keller, Richard C. Forthcoming (2026). “Madness in Context.” In A Cultural History of Madness––Volume 6, The Twentieth Century. Ed. by Ana Antic and Lamia Moghnieh. London: Bloomsbury.
• Keller, Richard C. 2024. “Climate Change, Covid-19, and the End of Excess Mortality: Extreme Heat in France since 2003.” Journal of Disaster Studies 1, no. 2: 249-63.
• Keller, Richard C. 2024. “The Universal, the Particular, and Vernacular Resistance in Colonial Algeria.” In Psychiatric Contours and New African Histories of Madness. Ed. by Hubertus Büschel and Nancy Rose Hunt. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, pp. 234-54.
• Keller, Richard C. 2022. “Memorializing Death in an Age of Mass Mortality: Keywords of Covid-19.” Somatosphere. http://somatosphere.net/2022/memorializing-death-mass-mortality-covid-keller.html/
• Keller, Richard C. 2021. “Environment.” In A Cultural History of Medicine––Volume 6, The Modern and Postmodern Age, 1920-2000. Ed. by Todd Meyers. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 15-35.
• Keller, Richard C. 2013. “Place Matters: Mortality, Space, and Urban Form in the 2003 Paris Heat Wave Disaster.” French Historical Studies 36, no. 2: 299-330. Winner of the 2013 William Koren, Jr. Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies
• Keller, Richard C. 2020. “Récits de la canicule 2003 : quantification, individu et épidémiologie qualitative.” In Les humanités médicales. Des sciences sociales aux transformations de la médecine. Ed. by Céline Lefève, François Thoreau, and Alexis Zimmer. Paris: Doin, pp. 111-26.
• Keller, Richard C. 2016. “Social Geographies of Sickness and Health in Contemporary Paris: Toward a Human Ecology of Mortality in the 2003 Heat Wave Disaster.” In The Routledge History of Disease. Ed. by Mark Jackson. London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 279-297.

Advisor To

• Cameron Daddis
• Keely Mruk
• Rohini Dasgupta

Courses Taught

• History of Science 213 – Global Environmental Health – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
• History/History of Science 508 – Patients, Medicine, and Doctors in Modern History – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
• MHB 543 – Doctors & Delusions: Madness and Medicine in the Modern Era
• MHB 553 – International Health and Global Society – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
• MHB 919 – Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Colonial Context