Henry M. Cowles

Henry Cowles has an AB in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and an MA and PhD in History of Science from Princeton University. At Yale University he is a historian of modern medicine and science in the United States and Great Britain. Henry’s work focuses on how certain issues come to be understood as issues of mind and brain: how psychologists, psychiatrists, and others have addressed questions of choice, authority, spontaneity, consumption, and method since the nineteenth century. His research and teaching interests include scientific medicine, the sciences of mind and brain, evolutionary theory, and experimentation in science, medicine, and the arts. He has also written on the concept of extinction and on the history of philosophy and teaches a range of courses, including “Minds and Brains in Modern America,” “History of Addiction,” and “Medicine and the Human Sciences.” His work has been awarded the Walter D. Love Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies and the Emerging Scholars Prize of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association.