Prof. Dr. Carsten Reinhardt

Carsten Reinhardt is director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of Science (I2SoS), and Principal Investigator in the SFB 1288, “Practices of Comparison”. He teaches at the Department of History and in the international Master Program ISoS.

Having received his MA and PhD in history of science and technology at the Technical University Berlin, he joined the faculty of the University of Regensburg in 1997, where he did his “Habilitation” in history of science in 2003. During this time, he was a fellow at Hebrew University and the University of Pennsylvania. Following stints at the Friedrich-Schiller-Jena and the Max-Planck-Institute for History of Science in Berlin as stand-in professor and research fellow, respectively, he joined the faculty of Bielefeld University in 2006. In 2013 he became CEO and President of the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, Pa., and returned to Bielefeld in 2016, as chair for historical studies of science.

Reinhardt’s work centers on the history of science and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially the chemical, physical and life sciences. He has worked on industrial research in the chemical industry in the late 1800s, on the rise of physical methods in chemistry in the late 1900s, and on the regulation of chemical hazard and risk in the twentieth century. Together with US-American and French colleagues, he brought forward the concept of “Residues” as a concept to tackle the long-term and far-ranging effects of chemical pollution on the planet. The 2022 book "Residues. Thinking Through Chemical Environments" in 2023 received the Robert K. Merton Book Award of the American Sociological Association, Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section. In his recent work, Reinhardt joins forces in an interdisciplinary fashion with philosophers and sociologists of science to investigate the uses of uncertainty in modern knowledge societies.

Reinhardt is the speaker of the Center for Science Studies of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina, and is or has been Principal Investigator in a number of DFG programs (PI of CRC 1288 “Practices of Comparison”; speaker of the Research Training Unit 725 “Entering the Knowledge Society”, and PI of Research Group 393 “Interactions of Science and Technology”). He has been a director of the program on the history of the Max Planck Society, and is a director of the project on the history of governmental research, 1918-1965, funded by the BMWiK.