Katja Guenther is a Professor of History at Princeton University. Her research focuses on the sciences and medicine of the mind and brain in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and North America. Her publications include The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences (Princeton, 2022) and Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of the Neuro and Psy Disciplines (Chicago, 2015). She is currently working on several book projects on the history of mental therapeutics. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2022.
Guenther will serve as an Old Dominion Research Professor in the Humanities Council for 2026-27. The professorship will support work on Thinking with Geel: A History of Psychiatric Therapeutic Communities, a book project examining the centuries-old yet ongoing practice of psychiatric foster care in the small town of Geel in Flemish Belgium.
