Nima Bassiri is a social theorist, historian, and philosopher of the human sciences, and an assistant professor at Duke University, where he teaches in the Program in Literature, Duke’s interdisciplinary humanities and cultural studies program. He is also the co-director of Duke’s Institute for Critical Theory, where he convenes the Critical Theory Workshop.
His first book, Madness and Enterprise (University of Chicago Press), explores how turn-of-the-century psychiatrists across Europe and North America deployed an economic style of reasoning to resolve ambiguities with respect to the status of mental health. In so doing, they inadvertently altered a longstanding equivalence between mental health and economic prosperity, by suggesting that in many cases mental pathologies were compatible with remunerative economic conduct and that sometimes a degree of madness was actually essential for financial success. The very category of madness, Bassiri argues, was transformed into an economic form, and consequently evaluated on the basis of its economic prospects, rather than simply on its medical or moral merits.
Bassiri is currently writing a second book, tentatively titled The Truth that Binds: Science, Theory, & Democracy, which explores the specter of ‘anti-science’ in the American political imaginary and, concomitantly, how the humanistic categories of ‘critique’ and ‘theory’ have been increasingly perceived as complicit with, and as providing intellectual succor for, scientific skepticism and, as such, culpable not only with the erosion of scientific truth but with core tenets of liberal democracy itself. His publications thus far have covered an array of topics in the history and philosophy of the human sciences, critical and social theory, intellectual history, and historical epistemology.
Before arriving at Duke, Bassiri was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Duke, and a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, where he was affiliated faculty in History and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. He received his PhD in the Rhetoric program at the University of California, Berkeley.