Dr Kathryn Schoefert

Biography

Kathryn Schoefert joined the department in 2015 as a research and teaching fellow associated with the Wellcome Trust-funded project “One Medicine”. She is a historian of mid-twentieth-century medicine and science, focused on the relationship between brain sciences and clinical medicine. She received her M.Phil. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge in 2011 and her Ph.D. from Cambridge in 2016. Her doctoral research was funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Research interests

• Histories of medicine and the life sciences in the twentieth century
• History of modern psychiatry, neurology and neuro-science
• Histories of clinical medicine, anatomy, and pathology

Kathryn’s current research examines the brain as a site of mediating, connecting, and shaping understandings of animal and human health in the mid-twentieth century. Her doctoral research illuminated concurrent research traditions in mid-twentieth-century German and Swiss psychiatry, arguing that studies of the brain were not abandoned as clinicians embraced newly introduced psychotropic drugs, somatic therapies, and psychological tests.

She has an abiding interest in the architectures and sites of twentieth-century science and medicine. Before returning to academia as a historian of science and medicine, she trained in architecture at the University of Virginia (Bachelor of Science, 2001) and Princeton University (M.Arch, 2006), practising as an architect for several years.