Ylva Söderfeldt

Docent och universitetslektor i idéhistoria.

Föreståndare för Centrum för medicinsk humaniora.

Projektledare för ERC Starting Grant-projektet ActDisease.

Foto: Yael Seligsohn

Member of the Young Academy of Sweden, 2019-2024

STINT Teaching Sabbatical, University of California Los Angeles, History Department, 2022

Uppsala University's Oscar Prize, 2018

Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute for History of Science/Berlin Centre for the History of Knowledge 2016-2017

Research Associate and Lecturer, Institute for History, Theory and Ethics in Medicine at RWTH Aachen University Hospital 2012-2016

Ph.D. in History, Stuttgart University/ Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation 2008-2011

B. A. and M.A. in History of Ideas, Stockholm University 2002-2006

My primary research interests are directed towards the relationship between expertise and subjectivity, i. e. between those who produce knowledge and the ones they produce knowledge about. This has led me to study people who, due to some deviation from the norm, become objects of concern for various kinds of experts who study, describe, manage, and treat them in various ways. Specifically, I am interested in how groups marked as “others” participate in defining themselves and how this process that affects both the “others” and the people, practices, institutions, and discourses surrounding them.

In a Swedish Research Council funded project and an ERC Starting Grant funded project I study the emergence of patient organizations and their relationship to medical expertise. The self-governed organizations people with particular illnesses in common began forming in the late 19th century have in the 20th century grown into an influential social movement, where patients engage in self-help, sociability, lobbying, and knowledge generation.

I am also leading a collaboration between the Medical Humanities units at Uppsala, Durham and Bonn funded by the Uppsala-Durham Seedcorn Fund and the Swedish Network for Medical Humanities.