School of History and Philosophy of Science

BA (Hons) University of Sydney, PhD University of New South Wales, Lecturer of History and Philosophy of Science

Jacqueline Dalziell is a Lecturer in the School of the History and Philosophy of Science, at the University of Sydney. Previously, she held Postdoctoral Fellowships at UNSW (Environmental Humanities) and Macquarie University (Philosophy) before joining the University of Sydney in 2023. Jacqueline's scholarship merges contemporary critical theory (STS, feminist) with perspectives from classical social theory (philosophy, psychoanalysis). Her research has been published in journals such as the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and Australian Feminist Studies. Jacqueline convenes Psychoanalysis at Sydney, a monthly seminar series at USYD.

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Ofer Gal received his PhD from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in 1996. He joined Sydney Unit for HPS in 2004, became its director in 2006 and a Full Professor in 2014. He has spent research periods at The Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin, The Dibner Institute at MIT, The Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies, The Program of History of Science at Princeton University, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies. He served as the director of the Unit for HPS 2005-2011, and the director of the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science 2013-2014. He also founded and co-directed the Sydney Society of Fellows 2015-2021 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW.

Peter grew up in Sydney. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Sydney, and he has a PhD in philosophy from UC San Diego. He taught at Stanford University between 1991 and 2003, and then combined a half-time post at the Australian National University and a visiting position at Harvard for a few years. He moved to Harvard full-time and was Professor there from 2006 to 2011, before moving to the CUNY Graduate Center. Since 2015 he has also had a half-time position in the HPS Unit at the University of Sydney.

MSc (Physics), Free University Berlin; PhD (History of Science), Harvard University

Kate is a philosopher and biologist who uses a mixture of philosophical and empirical methods in her work. She is interested in issues that intersect biology and philosophy, particulaurly those relating to causation and explanation, evidence, values in science, conservation values and decision making, sentience and animal behaviour.

Kate has a strong track record collaborating across disciplines, including ecology, psychology, medicine, and epidemology.

Dominic's main areas of interest are in the philosophy of the cognitive and biological sciences, especially issues in psychiatry and cognitive neuroscience. He has further interests in evolutionary theory, the history and philosophy of biology and medicine, moral psychology, epistemology and bioethics.

I'm an associate professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science. I was also a Research Fellow in Philosophy for a few years. Before coming to Sydney in 2011, I was a senior research fellow at Egenis, the University of Exeter. Prior to that, I spent a few years in Ford Doolittle's evolutionary microbiology lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I did my PhD on evolutionary explanations in the social sciences and humanities at the Universities of Edinburgh and Sussex.

Hans Pols is interested in the history, sociology, and anthropology of psychiatry and mental health. He is currently engaged in a large ARC-funded research project on the history of community mental health in Australia. Previously, he investigated the history of colonial and postcolonial medicine in the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia--the results can be found in his monograph Nurturing Indonesia.

For a blog on why Hans became a historian of psychiatry consult this blog post.

Apart from investigating the history of psychiatry and mental health, both in Australia and Indonesia, he is also involved in several projects focusing on improving mental heatlh services in both countries. The participation of consumers of mental health care in mental health services and the role of consumer organisations hold his special interest.

Hans earned his BA(Hon) in psychology from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands); an MA in psychology from York University (Canada); and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania through the Department of History and Sociology of Science.

He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and the Royal Society of New South Wales.

Georg Repnikov is a Lecturer in the School of History and Philosophy of Science teaching bioethics and philosophy of science. His primary research focus is on the philosophy of medicine, psychiatry, and psychology. He is particularly interested in the scientific classification and measurement of various human attributes as well as the values that shape research in this area across disciplines. His latest project involves the philosophical analysis of empirical research on neurodiversity and the concept of neurodivergence.

Dean received his PhD from the University of Leeds in 2004, under the supervision of Steven French, with a thesis on conceptual issues in quantum gravity. He took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary in 2005 (split between health sciences and philosophy), on the application of complex systems theory to population health. He joined HPS at the University of Sydney in 2007, receiving an ARC Australian Research Fellowship in 2008. Held then an ARC Future Fellowship 2014-2018. He has written various books, including the following:

• Harmony of the Spheres: Ancient and Recent Perspectives, co-edited with Ken Parry (Bloomsbury 2025)
• Quantum Gravity and Computation: Information, Pregeometry, and Digital Physics, co-edited with Xerxes D. Arsiwalla and Hatem Elshatlawy (Routledge 2025)
• Varieties of Nothingness, co-edited with Leslie Stein (Chiron 2024)
• Dual-Aspect Monism and the Deep Structure of Meaning, co-authored with Harald Atmanspacher (Routledge 2022)
• Life is Short: An Appropriately Brief Guide to Making it More Meaningful. (Princeton University Press 2022)