The glue that makes prevention and modernity stick

The University College Freiburg (UCF) is awarding Matthias Leanza the Erasmus Prize for the Liberal Arts and Sciences 2017 for his dissertation "Preventative Times. A Genealogy of Disease Prevention". The UCF has awarded this prize since 2013 to works whose topics are dealt with in an exemplary fashion from a historical and epistemological viewpoint and contribute to an interdisciplinary methodical and theoretical exchange. The award includes prize money of 5,000 Euros and is donated by the Sparkasse Freiburg-Nördlicher Breisgau.

In his dissertation Leanza traces the mutual genesis and interconnected history of prevention and modernity using disease prevention as an example. "To be modern means to engage in prevention," he claims: through a historic overview from the time of the Enlightenment up to the recent past, he shows how people have learned to treat potential future health hazards as an issue to be dealt with now and which paths they took to prevent diseases. Among other things he used sources from medical research reports and textbooks, health guides and exhibit catalogues, political program booklets and philosophical texts, legislation and ordinances as well as newspaper and magazine articles. From a methodological perspective Leanza combines scientific history with sociological societal theory and also creates a bridge between natural sciences and the humanities. The dissertation, which has been submitted to Prof. Dr. Ulrich Bröckling at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Freiburg, is slated to be published in the fall of 2017.

Matthias Leanza, born in 1981, studied sociology at the University of Bielefeld before working as a research associate at the Institute of Sociology at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg. In 2011 he switched to the Institute of Sociology at the University of Freiburg and worked as a research associate at the professorship for cultural sociology until 2016. He is now a senior assistant at the seminar for sociology at the University of Basel.

Contact:
Matthias Leanza
Seminar for Sociology
University of Basel
Tel.: +41 (0)61 207 24 28
E-Mail: matthias.leanza@unibas.ch