Richard C. Keller

Position title: Robert Turell Professor and Chair of Medical History and Bioethics

Phone: 608.263.7378

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

Joint Appointment: Medical History & Bioethics

Biography

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

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

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

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