Theodore M. Porter

Theodore M. Porter received his PhD in history and the history science at Princeton University in 1981. He went on to a postdoctoral instructorship at Caltech and spent a year at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld. He was then appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia. Since 1991, he has been at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is now Distinguished Professor in the Department of History. He held a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1989–1990) and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2010–2011) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2013–2014). His books include Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (2004) and Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (2018). At the MPIWG, his research will address the interplay of routinized and expert knowledge in relation to changing political economies.