Pia Paul is a PhD student in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley. Trained as a historian of science, she now works at the edges of disciplinary inquiry, examining the political and epistemic implications of postwar psychobiological concepts of organicist growth and self-organization. Pia is particularly interested in the ideological inflections of regeneration, freedom, and control in such theories of organicist growth—frameworks that continue to shape definitions of subjectivity and determinism in the human sciences. On a broader level, her research engages philosophical and theoretical substantiations of organismic self-organization—from German Idealism to Structuralism—to explore the discursive and epistemological stakes of internal regulation and systemic coherence across culture, science, and the human body.
Before coming to Rhetoric, Pia received her MA in intellectual history from New York University. Her thesis investigated the transformation of psychiatric classification systems—the way mental disorders are diagnosed and treated—in postwar transatlantic medicine. Pia’s main areas of interest lie in the mind and body sciences, metaphysics, and historical epistemology.
