L. Bican Polat

L. Bican Polat is a Clinical Associate Professor of History at NYU Shanghai. He received his joint-degree PhD in Intellectual History and Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2016, specializing in historical and social studies of science and medicine and historical epistemology.

His research focuses on the intertwined histories of the human and life sciences during the late modern period, with a particular emphasis on the emergence and evolution of developmental science and child psychiatry in America and Britain from the late nineteenth century to the present. Blending historical analysis with ethnographic and interpretive social science methods, he examines institutional changes, cultural transformations, and shifting thought styles and research practices that have shaped this medico-scientific field at the intersection of disciplines such as paediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychobiology. His work also addresses epistemological issues in developmental science, such as model building, theory construction, and replicability. Additionally, he explores how empirical research in developmental science intersects with contemporary debates on social cognition, extended emotions, and collective intentionality, drawing on insights from philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) approaches in cognitive science and psychological anthropology.

Prior to joining NYU, Dr. Polat was a postdoctoral researcher in the Michigan Society of Fellows at Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) and Department of Philosophy at Boğaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey). His work received the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and has appeared in publications including Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, ISIS, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.

Select Publications

• Mental Hygiene, Psychoanalysis, and Interwar Psychology: The Making of the Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis, ISIS, Journal of the History of Science Society, 112 (2), 2021, pp. 266-290.

• Model-as-Replica, Model-as-Instrument: Representational Power and Contextual Versatility in Animal Models, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 89, 2021, pp. 19-30.

• Modeling Mothering: The Development of an Experimental System in Neurobiology, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 43, 2021, 94.

• Section on the History of Ethnology and Ethnography (Edited with an Introduction), Handbook of the History of the Human Sciences, David McCallum (editor-in-chief), Palgrave, 2021.

• Before Attachment Theory: Separation Research at the Tavistock Clinic, 1948-1956, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 53 (1), 2017, pp. 48-70.

Education

• PhD, Intellectual History and Anthropology (Joint Degree)
  John Hopkins University