Annelie Drakman

Keywords

• history of physics
• history of science
• history of medicine
• intellectual history
• the history of ideas
• history of emotions

Biography

My name is Annelie Drakman and my research clusters around two topics: disgusting things and joy.

My main current research interest is trying to understand what it means when physicists say that they are only doing physics "for the fun of it". I guess what I am trying to discern is how passion and vocational devotion is expressed in different historical settings, and how it varies between professional fields. In case you are wondering – yes, indeed, doing research about fun is a lot of fun.

Since July 2025, I am employed at Uppsala University as an assistant professor in the history of science and ideas. Before that, I worked as a researcher and teacher at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University. 2020–2023 I was the PI of the project Joy in Science – the Function of Positive Emotions in Auto-Biographies by Nobel Laureates in Physics, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund).

In that project, I examined how expressions of joy are used by Nobel Laureates in physics to define research as an activity and the researcher as a person, mainly from 1945 onwards. In August 2023, I published the article "The Seductive Scientist", on why Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and James Watson worked so hard to portray themselves as fun people. It can be read here (no paywall!):

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2023.0051?fbclid=IwAR2L0nQZ528v1cZBix9Yho2naXjn59aeb1smEmdaGkSUnKIcPAwEoUU68y8

I've taught at several universities in Sweden, including the Karolinska Institute and Lund University, but mainly at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala. In June 2025, I co-taught two field excursions on the course Tellus III in geology together with professor Alasdair Skelton from Stockholm University.

I have been an invited speaker at KTH, Södertörn, Uppsala, Stockholm, Umeå, Gothenburg, Lund. In 2024, I was nominated to the Pro Futura Scientia program by the Tema department at Linköping University and made it to the interview stage. I have also been invited to be a guest lecturer and teacher at Colby College in Watertown, Maine, USA and at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

I've been invited to present my research at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Emotion in Berlin, Germany, at the Department for History of the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy; and at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark.

I've been a visiting doctoral student and scholar at King's College London (sponsor: historian Ludmilla Jordanova), New York University (sponsor: anthropologist Emily Martin) and Harvard University (sponsor: sociologist of science Steven Shapin). 

In 2018, I was awarded my Ph.D. in the History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University for a dissertation titled When the Body Closed and Became Firm: Why Bloodletting, the Miasmatic Theory and Climate Medicine were Abandoned in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Here I show how humoral pathology was much less influential during this century than is generally assumed. I also demonstrate why bloodletting made complete sense as treatment if one considers contemporary perceptions of what created disease. These arguments are based on 8800 annual reports written by Swedish provincial doctors 1820–1900. Furthermore, I show that the miasmatic theory (the idea that airborne decay caused epidemics) was an analogue problem to that medical issue bloodletting was meant to remedy: stagnant flows which caused decay, disease and death.

The main point is that doctors abandoned pre-bacteriological theories and practices long before bacteriology was established in the 1870s, since the doctors’ perceptions of how the body and its environment interacted changed dramatically. They abandoned the idea of ​​a flowing, fragile body which was open to external influences and instead began to treat a closed, delimited body whose inner, reactive powers needed to be strengthened. Hence the title of the dissertation.

If you are interested and can read Swedish, the whole book can be downloaded for free here (it includes an extensive English summary):

http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1195613&dswid=-5098

The dissertation was awarded the Carl Johan Association's prize for best historical work in 2019. Two articles stemming from it won second place in international essay competitions: The Shryock Medal Award 2018, awarded by The American Association of the History of Medicine, and the William Bynum Essay Prize 2017, awarded by the journal Medical History at Cambridge University Press.

http://www.histmed.org/past-shryock-medal-winners 

In relation to some work in the dissertation, I have become a bit interested in the digital humanities, and have published a bit on it in Lychnos.

If you are interested in contagion, leeches, putrefaction, or in joy, the history of emotion or the pursuit of fun, you are more than welcome to get in touch with me by emailing 

annelie.drakman@idehist.uu.se

Weirdly, I love emails, so please do not hesitate to reach out.