Richard Keller
Richard Keller is associate professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research lies at the intersection of the history and ethnography of European and global health. His first book, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2007), is a study of cross-cultural psychiatry in the twentieth century that examines behavioral science, mental health, and ideas about race in the contexts of colonialism and immigration in France.
Keller is now at work on two new research themes. The first, supported by the city of Paris and the National Science Foundation, is a study of the social determinants of vulnerability in the deadly European heat wave of 2003, with a focus on Paris and its suburbs. He also recently completed a closely related comparative study of mortality reporting in France, Britain, and the United States that was sponsored by the French Ministry of Health and undertaken with a University of Paris 13-based team. That study will be published by the Ecole Nationale de Santé Publique in 2010.
The second project examines the institutional and ideological links between colonial medicine and the globalization of public health. Keller’s work has appeared in the Journal of Social History, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and Historical Geography, and other periodicals.