Richard C. Keller

Position title: Professor of the History of Medicine

Phone: 608.263.7378

Address:
Office: 1423 Medical Science Center
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Joint Appointment: Medical History & Bioethics

Biography

My interests include the history of European and colonial medicine and public health and environmental history.

I am currently at work on two projects. The first is a global history of the environment; the second is a comparative history of the ecology of Lyme Disease.

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

Richard C. Keller. Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
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.
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.
Richard C. Keller. Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Selected Publications

“Place Matters: Mortality, Space, and Urban Form in the 2003 Paris Heat Wave Disaster,” French Historical Studies 36:2 (2013), 299-330. Awarded the 2014 William Koren, Jr., Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies.
“Cross National Qualitative Health Research” section in Ivy Bourgeault, Robert Dingwall, and Ray de Vries, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Methods in Health Research (SAGE Publications Ltd, 2010).
Vassy, Carine, and Richard Keller, “Faut-il contrôler les aspects éthiques de la recherche en sciences sociales et comment?,” Mouvements 55-56 (2008), 128-141.
“Clinician and Revolutionary: Frantz Fanon, Biography, and the History of Colonial Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81:4 (2007), 823-841.
“Geographies of Power, Legacies of Mistrust: Colonial Medicine in the Global Present,” Historical Geography 34 (2006), 26-48.
“Pinel in the Maghreb: Liberation, Confinement, and Psychiatric Reform in French North Africa,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79:3 (2005), 459-99.

Advisor To

Courses Taught

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