Authors

Reader Emeritus in History of Science, Lancaster University, UK; honorary fellow, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.

After an education in biology and then in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University, Roger Smith taught history of science and modern European intellectual history in the Department of History, Lancaster University. In 1998, he took early retirement in order to live as an independent scholar in Moscow. He has researched and published on topics related to the history of psychology, the mind-body question and conceptions of human nature. He is a past President of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences.

He has published Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials (1981); Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (1992): The Fontana/Norton History of the Human Sciences (1997); Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature (2007); Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870-1910 (2013); Between Mind and Nature: A History of Psychology (2013); with Irina Sirotkina, The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde: Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia (2017); and The Sense of Movement: An Intellectual History (2019). Four titles have also been published in Russian. He is currently writing a short book, for a general audience, on the feeling of embodied movement and why movement matters.

Beyond the history and philosophy of the human sciences, he has interests in writing, circulating unpublished stories about Russian life and two novels. He participates in a small studio of ‘musical movement’ in Moscow and shares the world of contemporary dance. He walks, when possible, in mountainous landscapes.

He sees his interests, career and teaching as continuously bridging relations between sciences and humanities, and between body and mind in human nature. He is interests in the methods and arguments that go into such bridging. All this comes together in exploring movement, intellectually and physically, as the expression and actuality of being alive.