Andreas Mayer

Professor Andreas Mayer of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales is the 2025–2026 Dornsife-EHESS Visiting Professor at USC, in residence February 2026. He is hosted by the USC Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies.

Andreas Mayer is a Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris. After earning degrees in sociology from the universities of Vienna (MA, 1994) and Bielefeld (PhD, 2001), he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and at the Department for the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. After his habilitation in history from the University of Bremen (2013), he has held several fellowships and guest professorships, more recently at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Humboldt University and the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and the Villa I Tatti in Florence. He has published widely on the history and epistemology of the human sciences, renewing in particular the history of psychoanalysis from an anthropological perspective which combines genetic studies of texts with an analysis of material and social settings. His current work focuses on a comparative history of translation practices in psychoanalysis whose aim is to analyse the processes of reception and adaptation through which Freud’s theories and therapies traveled in different linguistic, cultural, and political contexts. He is also pursuing the project of editing Balzac’s sociological essays (the Études Analytiques) and translating them into German, a project linked to a forthcoming study which reassesses the writer’s own engagement with multiple scientific and intellectual traditions in order to reveal its aesthetic and political implications for his and our times.

The following programs have been organized as part of the visit. More details forthcoming.

• Seminar—Richard von Krafft-Ebing and pre-Freud history of sexuality in Vienna
  Wednesday, February 11 | HIST 397 | by invitation only
• Talk—Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis: Beyond the Biographical Illusion
  Thursday, February 12, 7:00 PM @ Thomas Mann House | by invitation only
• Talk—Freud in Translation: Towards a Comparative History
  Wednesday, February 18, 12:30–2:00 PM @ THH309k | Department of French and Italian
  
• Talk—Naked Souls. The Libertine Past of the Psychoanalytic Couch
  Thursday, February 19, 12:30–2:00 PM @ SOS 250 | Van Hunnick History Department

Header image: “Le Plus Grand Reseau du Monde,” Lucien Boucher,
Air France, 1964, David Rumsey Map Center