My name is Thomas and I’m a writaholic!

I have spent 55 years of my life as a university teacher, researcher and public intellectual in Sweden and Denmark (interrupted by a couple of years in the US and the UK).

After finishing gymnasium in Stockholm in 1965, I did undergraduate studies in chemistry, zoology and geology in Stockholm, and then began on a PhD research project in molecular evolution at the Karolinska Institute. After two years, however, I quit my promising scientific career in favour of studies in history of ideas and philosophy of science in Umeå.

In 1975, I was appointed lecturer at Roskilde University in Denmark, where I taught history of science to undergraduates, and wrote about the history the new intelligentisa class for Swedish newspapers and magazines for more than a decade. I also began a new PhD project on the history of ecology and defended my PhD thesis at the University of Gothenburg in 1986.

During the 1980’s I mainly thought of myself as a public intellectual. After a postdoc year at Stanford in 1991-92, however, I began taking my academic career seriously, and over the next 15 years, I specialized in the history of immunology and in methodological studies in the historiography of recent science, including scientific biography as a genre.

In 1999, I was appointed to the chair in history of medicine at the University of Copenhagen and made a new career shift to museum studies and scientific communication; as director of Medical Museion I transformed the former medical museum to a new kind of biomedicine and art institution, and also began an active presence on social media, writing about the interface between biomedicine, aesthetics and museums.

I retired in 2016. Now I am an emeritus professor in my former department, working on the genre of autobiography and a memoir of my own life and work. I also have a secondary sine cura affiliation as adjunct emeritus professor in the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University in Sweden.

In the course of my fifty years in Academia, I have written hundreds of articles and a couple of books, given innumerable seminars, lectures and invited talks, trained thousands of undergraduate and graduate students, supervised two handfulls of PhD students, curated a couple of exhibitions, and even made a few sci-art works.

I also (surprise, surprise!) have a somewhat more private life — but more about that in the forthcoming memoir.