Sabine Arnaud

Sabine Arnaud’s research focuses on the instrumentalization of the question of deafness in the construction of various disciplines, and the study of conflicting new conceptions of the human and of normality/abnormality. Studying deafness from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, her project traces the crucial role that language has played in how we define humanity, and analyzes the many ways in which this relationship has been articulated (voice and sign language). The new research project follows the completion of a monograph on hysteria published by the Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in January 2014, which won the « Prix d’histoire de la médecine » awarded by the French Society for the History of Medicine and the Academy of Medicine, the prize « Bourse Marcelle Blum » awarded by the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and the prize for young historians by the International Academy of the History of Science (granted unanimously). A version in English appeared with The University of Chicago Press in 2015 as On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category (1670-1820). Sabine Arnaud is a member of the editorial board of the journal History of Human Sciences, published by Sage.

A US doctorate in Comparative Literature (City University of New York) in cotutelle with a French thesis in History and Civilizations (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and graduate theses in Philosophy and Art History (Paris VIII-Vincennes-Saint Denis) have guided Sabine Arnaud’s approach to visual and textual documents.

Before joining the MPIWG, Sabine Arnaud was an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University. Her research on hysteria has previously been supported by a Milton Brown Dissertation Fellowship and fellowships from the New York Academy of Medicine, the Société Internationale d’Etude des Femmes de l’Ancien Régime, the Countway Library of Harvard University, the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, and The Institute for the Medical Humanities of The University of Texas.