csaba-olasz

Csaba Olasz is a PhD candidate in history of science at the University of California San Diego. His field of interest is Cold War science with special focus on entanglements of different knowledge domains, especially that of the life sciences and the humanities. His dissertation, “The Humanist Impulse: A Movement against Scientific Reductionism, 1945–1980” considers three decades of anti-reductionist organizing, investigating the institutions, conversations, and achievements of a group of intellectuals who participated in the debates on the epistemic claims of reductive conceptual schemes of behaviorism and neo-Darwinism. The project offers a second look at the aspirations of an international, interdisciplinary cohort of scholar-scientists who gathered behind an outsider to challenge the ontology of reductionism in American experimental psychology and biology.

When not preoccupied with research projects, Olasz works as a teaching assistant at one of UCSD’s eight colleges, leading discussion sections in the humanities, a writing program designed to STEM students. He also twice taught a lower division course, “History of Public Health,” of his own design. Before coming to the Science History Institute, he held short term fellowships at the Linda Hall library in Kansas City and at the University of Chicago. Csaba received his BA at ELTE University, Budapest and his MA at Central European University (now in Vienna, Austria).