Greg Eghigian

I’m a historian of the human sciences and medicine as well as modern Europe. I am particularly interested in how societies use science, technology, and medicine to define and treat people and behaviors deemed to be troubling, bizarre, or outright dangerous. My research has therefore focused on such things as disability, delinquency, criminality, mental illness, and security. More recently, my attention has shifted to studying the modern history of supernatural and paranormal phenomena. My latest book is a history of reports of UFOs and claims of alien contact throughout the world. I am presently working on two new book projects: the first is a broad overview of the history of madness from the ancient world to the present; the second is a study of the alien abduction phenomenon in the late-20th century.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon (Oxford University Press, 2024).

“Flying Saucers and UFOs in US Advertising During the Cold War, 1947–1989” (co-authored with Matthew McAllister), Advertising and Society Quarterly, 23 (Fall 2022)

Editor, The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health (Routledge Press, 2017)

“Making UFOs Make Sense: Ufology, Science, and the History of Their Mutual Mistrust,” Public Understanding of Science, 26 (2017): 612-626.

The Corrigible and the Incorrigible:  Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth Century Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2015)

“A Drifting Concept for an Unruly Menace: A History of Psychopathy in Germany,” Isis, 106 (2015): 283-309.

Editor, From Madness to Mental Health:  Psychiatric Disorder and its Treatment in Western Civilization (Rutgers University Press, 2010)

AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS

Visiting Research Scholar, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, Fall 2024.

Resident Scholar, Humanities Institute, Penn State University, Spring 2024.

Price/Webster Prize of the History of Science Society, 2018. Awarded to the best article published over the past three years in the Society’s journal Isis.

Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 2017.

DAAD and German Studies Association Book Prize for Best Book in History 2017 for The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany.

Fellow in Aerospace History. American Historical Association and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 2016-2017.

American Philosophical Society, Library Residential Fellow, 2015-2016.