Monika Wulz

CV

Monika Wulz is a historian and philosopher of science. After finishing her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Vienna on the epistemology of Gaston Bachelard, Monika was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, at the Technical University Braunschweig, the Universities of Konstanz and Luzern. Currently she is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Chair for Science Studies at ETH Zurich. 2018–2021 she has been the coordinator of the doctoral program «History of Knowledge» at ETH and University of Zurich. She has held research fellowships at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv (2018) and at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin (2019 und 2021).

Monika’s research focuses on the relations of science, epistemology, economy and «intellectual labor» around 1900; on science and theory as part of political, economic, and social history; on the history of epistemology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; on historical epistemology and political history of knowledge.

In her current book project «Economies of Intellectual Work, ca. 1840–1930», she explores economic conceptions of science and knowledge in the decades around 1900. The project analyzes how the economic conditions of intellectual work – in view of industrialization and globalization – were debated from different economic and political angles and in different disciplines, such as in economic and cultural theory as well as in the then emerging fields of experimental psychology, sociology, and epistemology. It shows how, in these contexts, different and sometimes even competing approaches to the funding of intellectual work and science were debated: from fellowships for gifted students, the capital value of innovation, reform of property law to the call for inheritance taxation or basic security in order to foster all sorts of independent intellectual activities.