profile picture of Lara Keuck (glasses, up-tied hair, blue shirt)
People

Lara Keuck

Research Group Leader (Apr 2021-Jun 2026)

Dr.

Lara Keuck is a professor of history and philosophy of medicine at Bielefeld University. At the MPIWG she leads an independent Max Planck Research Group on Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences. Lara graduated in molecular biomedicine at Bonn University with a Diploma thesis in virology at the Robert Koch Institute in 2008. She then participated in a German-French PhD program in History, Philosophy, and Ethics of Medicine at the University Medical Center Mainz and the Philosophy Department of the École normale supérieure in Paris, and completed her dissertation Towards an Epistemology of Medical Classification Systems in 2012. Her research was awarded the 2012 Prize for Philosophy in Psychiatry of the German Association of Psychiatry DGPPN. 

In 2012–2015, Lara held postdoctoral positions at the MPIWG and at the Institute of Philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin, where she worked on a project on blurred boundaries, from which grew a book on vagueness in psychiatry. The ETH Zurich awarded her a Branco Weiss Fellowship in 2015, the funding from which was used to establish a junior research group Learning from Alzheimer’s Disease: A History of Biomedical Models of Mental Illness, which she led from 2015–2021 at the Department of History of HU Berlin. Lara has also been a short-term visiting scholar at Princeton University, University of Exeter, and Université de Bordeaux. In 2020 she was elected to Die Junge Akademie, the young academy of Leopoldina and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Lara has lectured in medicine, philosophy, and history, and has collaborated with scientists and scholars across these fields, in particular on meta-methodological questions and on the uses of history and philosophy in biomedicine.

About the Research Group

 

Projekte

Commoning Biomedicine: Networking Decentralized Collections of Oral Histories

MEHR

Health Beyond Medicine

MEHR

Identity in Histories of Science, Medicine, and Heritage

MEHR

The History of Lucid Dreaming Research: An Interdisciplinary Oral History

MEHR

Translating Validity in Psychiatric Research

MEHR

Validation and Regulation in the Sciences of Health

MEHR

Validation at the Borderline

MEHR

Encounters between Medicine, Literature, Philosophy, and their Circulation in Public Debates

MEHR

Epistemologies of Heritable Disease Classifications in the Early 1950s

MEHR

Selected Publications

Demazeux, Steeves and Lara K. Keuck (2023). “Comment peut-on être précis les yeux fermés?” In Promesses et limites de la psychiatrie de précision: enjeux pratiques, épistémologiques et éthiques, ed. C. Gauld, S. Demazeux, and É. Giroux, 201–230. Paris: Hermann.

Read More

Keuck, Lara K. and Kärin Nickelsen (2022). “Introduction: Embracing Ambivalence and Change.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 45 (3): 291–300. https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.202200044.

Read More

Chen, Esther (2022). Politics of Sources Meets the Practices of the Librarian: An Interview with Esther Chen. Interview by Lara K. Keuck and Kärin Nickelsen. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 45 (3): 508–516. https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.202200035.

Read More

Hendriksen, Marieke, Christian Joas, Lara K. Keuck, Dominik Knaupp, Fabian Krämer, and Kärin Nickelsen, eds. (2022). Histories of Ethology: Methods, Sites, and Dynamics of an Unbound Discipline. Special issue, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 45 (1–2). Weinheim: Wiley-VCH. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15222365/2022/45/1-2.

Read More

Hendriksen, Marieke, Christian Joas, Lara K. Keuck, Dominik Knaupp, Fabian Krämer, and Kärin Nickelsen (2022). “Editorial.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 45 (1–2): 7–9. https://doi.org/10.1002/bewi.202280105.

Read More

Keuck, Lara K. and Kärin Nickelsen, eds. (2022). On Epistemic Times: Writing History 25 Years after Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Special issue, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 45 (3). Weinheim: Wiley-VCH. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15222365/2022/45/3.

Read More

Keuck, Lara K. (2022). “Locating Sources, Situating Psychiatry, Complicating Categories: A Journey through Three German Archives.” In Invisible Labour in Modern Science, ed. J. Bangham, X. Chacko, and J. Kaplan, 275–283. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Read More

Keuck, Lara K. and Katrin von Lehmann (2021). “‘Ich kann es nicht denken, sondern ich muss es tun.’ Entwicklung künstlerischer Praxis im Austausch mit der Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Ein Gespräch zwischen Lara Keuck und Katrin von Lehmann im März 2021.” In Katrin von Lehmann: Textura performativa 5, ed. R. Schrohe, 24–29. Berlin: Distanz Verlag.

Read More

Keuck, Lara K. and Alfred Freeborn (2020). “The Limits of Biomarkers. Contemporary Re-Phrasings of Canguilhem.” In Vital Norms: Canguilhem’s “The Normal and the Pathological” in the Twenty-First Century, ed. P.-O. Méthot, 346–367. Paris: Hermann.

Read More

Keuck, Lara K. (2020). “A Window to Act? Revisiting the Conceptual Foundations of Alzheimer’s Disease in Dementia Prevention.” In Preventing Old Age and Decline? Critical Observations on Aging and Dementia, ed. A. Leibing and S. Schicktanz, 19–39. New York: Berghahn Books.

Read More

Features and Digital Resources

Past Events

Presentations, Talks, & Teaching Activities

"Testing Knowledge: Validation and Regulation in the Sciences of Health"

History of Medicine Seminar Series, Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles, California

Valide Evidenz in Bezug auf was?

Die unterschätzte Herausforderung: chronische Entzündungskrankheiten - Epistemologische, ethische und ökonomische Aspekte der Präzisionsmedizin, Tagung, ImmoPier Kiel, Kiel

Tagungsprogramm
"Uncertainty in monitoring and treatment of complex chronic diseases"

Workshop: "Perspectives on biases and knowledge gaps in medicine", University of Oslo, Norway

Commoning Biomedicine Public Launch Event

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Veränderbarkeit und Wirkmächtigkeit von medizinischen Diagnosen

Interdisziplinäre Paneldiskussion ZAB - Forum Barrierefrei, Universität Bielefeld mit Christian Brandt, Tanja Sappok, Sabine Steinke, moderiert von Ninia LaGrande

Panelbeschreibung
Research Colloquium on Philosophy of the Life Sciences, co-hosted with Marie I. Kaiser and Alkistis Elliot-Graves

Universität Bielefeld

Building Blocks of a Spectrum

Biomedical Visions: Aesthetics, Epistemology, and Medical Practice, Authors' Workshop, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

In Search of Biomedical Validity: Towards a Cross-Disciplinary History of Validation Practices

Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, University of Toronto Symposium, together with Simon Brausch, Sam Ducourant, Alfred Freeborn, Ariane Hanemaayer, Michele Luchetti, and Hanna Worliczek

Global Disease Concepts in Local Environments

Joint Conference of CIUHCT, CFCUL and I2SoS, Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of Science (I2SoS), Lissabon-Bielefeld

Was ist die Alzheimer Krankheit? Historische und philosophische Reflexionen auf eine ungelöste Frage

Wissen und Wissenschaft: historische und systematische Perspektiven, Lecture Series, Universität Hamburg

„Scope Validity in Medicine“

International Workshop ‘Health and Disease as Practical Concepts', Erasmus MC, Rotterdam

Continuity Claims in Classification

International Workshop on Diagnosis in the Making, Copenhagen

Validation and Regulation in the Sciences of Health

Invited Lecture, Medical Museion, Copenhagen

Scope Validity in Medicine

Egenis Research Exchange 

Validation and Regulation in the Sciences of Health

I²SoS-Colloquium, Universität Bielefeld

Lehrveranstaltungen in der interdisziplinären Profilierung „Medical Humanities“ und im Kerncurriculum der Medizin zur Geschichte und Wissenschaftstheorie der Medizin

Universität Bielefeld

The Regulatory Ethos of Science

Validation and Regulation in the Sciences of Health, Workshop, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

Validity in the Biomedical Sciences: A Relational Epistemology

University of Oslo

The Science Studies Colloquium Series
Steeves Demazeux and Lara Keuck: Three challenges to validity in psychiatric research

Quelles philosophies pour la psychiatrie ? Colloque international, Centre Broca, Paris

Wahrheit – Salon über ein nur scheinbar gefestigtes Gut

Salon der Komischen Oper Berlin und der Schering Stiftung, zusammen mit Dr. Phillip Blum

Auf der Suche nach Validität: Psychiatrische Forschung und ihre Übersetzungsprobleme, ca. 1955-2013

Forschungskolloquium, Institut für Philosophie, Literatur-, Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte, Technische Universität Berlin

Valide Diagnosen? Evaluative Kategorien in der Biomedizin

Symposium der Klasse IV – Geistes-, Sozial- und Verhaltenswissenschaften, Leopoldina Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften, Halle (Saale)

7. Offenes Forum Geschichte der Lebenswissenschaften.

Organisiert von Lara Keuck, Birgit Nemec, Johannes Schuckert und Hanna Worliczek. Naturhistorisches Museum Wien; Institut für Geschichte der Universität Wien.

Programm
Remembering, differently? Ander(e)s Erinnern in Künsten und Wissenschaften. Wissenstadt Berlin 2021.

Organisiert von Lara Keuck und Michael Bies. Clärchens Ballhaus (Spiegelsaal), Auguststraße 24, 10117 Berlin 

Einladung
Historicizing Validity: Scoping Alzheimer’s Disease

Laboratoire d'Excellence DistAlz, Espace éthique Ile-de-France, Équipe de Recherche en Éthique et Épistémologie

Praktiken der Validierung: Zur Methodengeschichte der Biomedizin

Lehrstuhl für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, LMU München

Provenance and validity: on retrospective diagnosis and biomedical history

CIRCUS, University of Uppsala, SWE

“Scope Validity in Medicine” (invited panel)

American Philosophical Association

Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Oral History/Wissenschaft und Demokratie, 1989/90

Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften, HU Berlin

Nachrichten & Presse

Newsletter der Max Planck Research Group "Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences"

Mehr

Sonderausgabe: On Epistemic Times: Writing History 25 Years after Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube

Mehr

Lara Keuck sprach mit der Pharmazeutischen Zeitung über Wahrheit und Wissen in der Wissenschaft

Mehr