Dr Staffan Mueller-Wille

Extension: 5134

Telephone: 01392 269134

Senior Lecturer

Staffan received his academic education at the universities of Kiel, Berlin (West) and Bielefeld. He held a research position at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science (Berlin) before he moved to the University of Exeter in 2004. He currently holds a joint position as lecturer in both the Department of Sociology and Philosophy and the Department of History, and is associated with the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis) and the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter.

Staffan's research is strongly interdisciplinary, moving back and forth between the history, philosophy and social studies of the life sciences. He has published extensively on the history of taxonomy, with a focus on the work of the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, and on the history of the concepts of heredity, gene, and race. Recent publications include:

Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture 1500-1870 (MIT Press, 2007), an essay volume co-edited with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger;
Musa cliffortiana/Cliffords Banana Plant (IAPT, 2007), an edition of a book published by Linnaeus in 1737; and
Vererbung: Geschichte und Kultur eines biologischen Konzepts (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009), a book co-authored with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger on the history and culture of the concept of heredity, which will be translated into English for University of Chicago Press.
Das Gen im Zeitalter der Postgenomik: Eine wissenschaftshistorische Bestandsaufnahme (Suhrkamp, edition unseld, 2009), a book co-authored with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger on the evolution of the gene concept..

Staffan is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.

Research Projects:

A Cultural History of Heredity (funded by the Karl-Schaedler Foundation)

Re-Writing the System of Nature: Linnaeus's Use of Writing Technologies (Funded by the Wellcome Trust)