Alfred Freeborn

Alfred Freeborn is a historian of psychiatry based in Berlin. He is currently a Research Scholar in the Department on Knowledge Systems and Collective Life (Benson) and a former member of the Research Group on Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences (Keuck) at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Alfred investigates changes in how psychiatric research has been evaluated as part of the postwar globalization of biomedicine. Alfred read History at the University of Cambridge, receiving the Cambridge Historical Society Prize and was awarded an Isaac Newton Trust scholarship to complete an MPhil in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science where he worked on diverse areas of research from Enlightenment cartography to twentieth-century social theory. In 2020, Alfred was a visiting scholar at the German Historical Institute in London and a visiting lecturer in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, where he taught courses on the history of the human sciences. In 2024, he received the Early Career Prize of the History of the Human Sciences journal for his work on postwar methodological reforms in psychiatric diagnosis. Currently, he is involved in several collaborative projects in the history of biomedicine while also completing his first monograph Biomedical Madness: Schizophrenia and the Making of Biological Psychiatry. 

Contact:
Alfred Freeborn
a.freeborn[at]berlin.bard.edu