Lecturer in History of Life, Human and Earth Sciences in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge

Staffan holds an Honorary Chair in the Institute for Medical History and Science Studies at the University of Lübeck, and co-directs the Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences.

From 1998 to 2000, Staffan worked as a curator at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden and then joined the Max Planck Institute of History of Science in Berlin (Dept. Rheinberger). From 2004 to 2019, he taught at the University of Exeter and co-directed Egenis – The Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences.

In his research, Staffan approaches questions of historical epistemology through detailed case studies covering the history of the life and the human sciences since the early modern period. He is particularly interested in the role of classification in the generation of knowledge.

Staffan is interested in how the classification, naming and description of organisms facilitates the storage, organisation, and mobilisation of knowledge. He is currently developing a new methodology to address the question of how knowledge in natural history is generated 'in transit' (Secord).

One of Staffan's long term research interests has been in the history of race and kinship in anthropology. In contrast to a longstanding tradition that largely treats the history of race as the history of a false idea, he is interested in its pragmatic and political dimensions.

He is also interested in the history of heredity, in particular its role as a capricious force in theories of evolution, its relation to cell theory and concepts of specificity, the status of the gene as a 'concept in flux', and the interplay of statistics and hereditary research around 1900.

Staffan was trained in Geology and Palaeontology and holds a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Bielefeld.