I am an intellectual historian of science with an interdisciplinary background spanning French literature, the history of science and medicine, and experimental physics. My research focuses on interactions between science and literature in 19th-century France, particularly in the area of the nascent psychological and human sciences. Within the Narrative Science Project, I examine textual practices in case histories (or “observations”) in French psychology c.a. 1870–1914. I explore how narrative styles, narrator roles, and projected modes of reading functioned to constitute and disseminate scientific knowledge about human minds and comportments. Additionally, it will be productive to extend this approach and compare narrative practices in French psychological writings with those present in anthropology or sociology in the same period. My interest in narrative and in “reading scientific texts like novels” continues the theme of my doctoral research, which investigated reciprocities between scientific and literary forms of enquiry in 19th-century efforts to make hypnotism a science.

 

Publications

Journal articles:

Kim M. Hajek, “‘A Portion of Truth’: Demarcating the Boundaries of Scientific Hypnotism in Late Nineteenth-Century France.” Notes and Records (Special issue on the History of Hypnotism) 71, no. 2 (2017): 125–139.

Kim M. Hajek. “‘Je lis ça comme je lirais un roman’: Reading Scientific Works on Hypnotism in Late Nineteenth-Century France.” Australian Journal of French Studies 53, no. 3 (2016): 232-45.

Awarded the Australian Society for French Studies/Australian Journal of French Studies Postgraduate Essay Prize, 2015.

Kim M. Hajek. “Imperceptible Signs: Remnants of magnétisme in Scientific Discourses on Hypnotism in Late Nineteenth-Century France.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 51, no. 4 (2015): 366–86.

Awarded the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Award, 2014.

Kim M. Hajek. “The Fear of Simulation: Scientific Authority in Late Nineteenth-Century French Disputes over Hypnotism.” History of Science 53, no. 3 (2015): 237–63.

K. M. Hajek, B. Littleton, D. Turk, T. J. McIntyre, and H. Rubinsztein-Dunlop. “A Method for Achieving Super-Resolved Widefield Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering (CARS) Microscopy.” Optics Express 18, no. 18 (2010): 19263–72.

L. Guyon, K. M. Hajek, F. Courvoisier, V. Boutou, R. Nuter, A. Vincotte, S. Champeaux, L. Bergé, and J.-P. Wolf. “Control of Lasing Filament Arrays in Nonlinear Liquid Media.” Applied Physics B 90, no. 3–4 (2007): 383–90.

 

Book chapters:

Kim M. Hajek. “En rapport avec le texte: La suggestion hypnotique entre fragment littéraire et objet scientifique à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle.” In Le Réel invisible: Le Magnétisme dans la littérature (1789–1914), edited by Emilie Pézard and Victoire Feuillebois. Paris: Minard/Classiques Garnier, (forthcoming).