Alongside experimental work, I am interested in what makes behaviour so hard to explain. Behaviour is a primary phenomenon in its own right and not merely a surface to be dissolved into the physiology beneath it. Holding such a view has never been neutral. I examine how these commitments have shaped the science across its history.
My most recent work pursues this through the history of experimental neurosis between 1900 and 1950, a period when researchers induced states of breakdown in animals and read them as evidence about the nature of behaviour itself. That history, set out in “The ontological status of behaviour: lessons from experimental neurosis (1900–1950)”, shows how assumptions about what behaviour is quietly shaped what experiments were taken to prove.
The reflective and the experimental are not separate pursuits. Both turn on a single question, what is expressed through behaviour.