December 17, 2014
Richard C. Keller has been named associate dean of the UW–Madison Division of International Studies by Vice Provost and Dean Guido Podestá.
“I am delighted that Professor Keller is joining the Division in a key leadership role,” Podestá says. “His experience in working with a variety of units at UW–Madison will be valuable as he leads our efforts to facilitate and promote more collaboration and interdisciplinary research among our partners across campus and beyond.”
Keller, professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics, is faculty director of UW–Madison’s International Studies Major and of Global Studies, a federally funded National Resource Center in the International Institute. His affiliations include the Department of the History of Science, the Global Health Institute, and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies’ Center for Culture, History and the Environment. He is also a member of the Institut de Recherche sur les Enjeux Sociaux, a research institute at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
“UW-Madison has a long and outstanding tradition of global engagement, which is part of what drew me here over a decade ago,” Keller says. “The teaching, research, and outreach of every school and college on the campus is international in scope. A glance at the headlines — from the Ebola epidemic to the rise of ISIS to the fiscal crisis in Europe — indicates that the enrichment of knowledge about the world around us remains as important as ever before.”
As associate dean, Keller will serve as the chief faculty advisor to the vice provost/dean on a range of international issues and will assist with general administration of the division. He will serve as liaison to the International Institute and play a lead role in promoting collaboration among key stakeholders.
“It is a privilege to take on this position,” says Keller, who will assume this role as of Jan. 1, 2015. “I look forward to the opportunities and challenges of taking the exciting international activities of this campus to the next level.”
His areas of expertise include climate change and its health consequences, historical and cultural dimensions of global health, and race and health. His latest research focuses on the social dimensions of risk and vulnerability during the 2003 heat wave disaster in Paris, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mairie de Paris, and the French Ministry of Health.
Keller is the author of Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Enregistrer les morts, identifier les surmortalités: Une comparaison Angleterre, Etats-Unis et France (Presses de l’Ecole des hautes études en santé publique, 2010, with Carine Vassy and Robert Dingwall), and is co-editor ofUnconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Duke University Press, 2011, with Warwick Anderson and Deborah Jenson).
His articles have appeared in French Historical Studies, the Journal of Social History, theBulletin of the History of Medicine, Historical Geography, and Mouvements.
He has received the H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship Award (2011-12) from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. He has a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder (’92 and ’96) and Ph.D. from Rutgers University (’01), all in history.
This story was originally published by the Division of International Studies.