Simon Torracinta

I’m a sixth-year PhD candidate in the History of Science and Medicine. My research centers on the history of the modern human sciences, with a particular emphasis on the history of economic, psychological, and anthropological thought. My dissertation, tentatively titled Economy of Desire: Sciences of Want, 1870-1970, is a comparative history of scientific ideas about human want and motivation across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In it, I argue that the secularization of the human sciences, and the decline of introspective methods for investigation of mental states and feelings, produced parallel behavioristic turns across much of the emerging disciplines, with profound impacts on political and economic life – and our understanding of ourselves to this day.

I’ve written about related issues for publications including n+1, Boston Review, and New Labor Forum. You can find my personal website here.