Dr. Verena Lehmbrock

I am a historian of science with a special interest in the human sciences, including economics and psychology. My research focuses on the co-evolution of knowledge, economy, and subjectivity from the early modern period to contemporary history. Anchored in historical semantics and historical epistemology, my general approach is to focus on conceptual change and fundamental epistemic categories in seemingly mundane contexts.

Project on ‘technologies of the self’ under state socialism, the case of psychological leadership training in East German Industrialism 1960s-90s (funded by DFG – German Research Council).

Co-founder of GWMT group Forum for the History of the Human Sciences.

Member of Review Committee of Cheiron – the international society for the history of the behavioral and social sciences

Board member of Gesellschaft für Agrargeschichte – the German Rural History Society

MA Philosophy & Early Modern/ Modern History (Berlin Humboldt University, 2006)

PhD History of Science (Berlin Technical University, 2016)

BSc Psychology (Hagen University, expected 2023)             

Teaching

2023         (with Mike Cotterell) Trust Dilemmas: Doubt and Irrational Logic/ Erfurt University

2022         (with Mike Cotterell) Self-Care versus Civil Duty/ Erfurt University

2021/22   Psychological Humanities: Theoretical and Historical Foundations of Modern Psychological Science/ Erfurt University

2016/17   Introduction to the History of Science & its Methodology/ Technical University Berlin

Recent Publications

    [The Farmer as Thinker] Der denkende Landwirt. Agrarwissen und Aufklärung in Deutschland 1750–1820 (Norm und Struktur 50). Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau 2020 (engl. summary pp. 253–269).

By excavating both the social and epistemic values attached to science, agricultural labor, and farm management, the book traces the intricate entanglements between science and society – changing concepts of knowledge and social change. 

Review: Bauer, Josef, Vierteljahrschrift Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (2022), elibrary.steiner-verlag.de/content/pdf/99.105010/vswg202201011801.pdf.

Review: Kopsidis, Michael, Central European History (2022), doi.org/10.1017/S0008938922000176.

Review: Godel, Rainer, NTM – Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (2021), doi.org/10.1007/s00048-021-00292-w.

Review: Huff, Tobias, sehepunkte 21 (2021), www.sehepunkte.de/2021/05/34632.html.

Review: Tribe, Keith, Agricultural History Review (2021), Vol. 69, No 2, p. 313.

Review: Zimmermann, Clemens, Historische Zeitschrift (2021), doi.org/10.1515/hzhz-2021-1126.

Review: Böning, Holger, Informationsmittel (IFB) : digitales Rezensionsorgan für Bibliothek und Wissenschaft (2020), www.informationsmittel-fuer-bibliotheken.de/showfile.php.

    Elevated to the Ranks of a Science. Manual Labor and Albert Thaer’s Doctrine of Rational Agriculture, Science in Context (2023, forthcoming).

    Paying attention to each other. An essay on the transnational intersections of industrial economy, subjectivity, and governance in East Germany’s social psychological training, Journal for the history of the behavioral sciences (2022, early view). doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22212.

    Eine Intervention zur Befähigung des sozialistischen Leiters. Funktion und Bedeutung des sozialpsychologischen Trainings in der DDR, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 48 (2022): 247– 271, ISSN: 0340-613X.

    Early modern echo chambers. Material improvement, social inequality, and the restricted circulation of knowledge in 19th Century Bavaria, Journal for the History of Knowledge 3 (2022), 1–13. doi.org/10.55283/jhk.11356.

    Tracing the co-evolution of economy and the self through the lens of a single concept: the rational farmer. A plea for inter-relational approaches to conceptual history, in: Hendriksen, Marieke & Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis (ed.): Early Modern Understandings of Knowledge 1500–1900 (Knowledge Societies in History 5). Abingdon, New York: Routledge (under review).

    A Collective Without Collective Style: The Intellectual Trajectory of the SSRC’s Committee on Transnational Social Psychology, 1960s and early 1970s, Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports (2023, in preparation).