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Ulrich Koch is a psychologist as well as a historian and philosopher of the medical sciences. He currently is Assistant Professor at the George Washington University's School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, DC. Before joining GW, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Humanities Center of the Johns Hopkins University. Dr Koch teaches a broad range of courses that cover social science and humanities perspectives on health, illness and clinical care. His research interrogates the history and epistemology of the health professions and their interdisciplinary entanglements. His first book recounts the shifting characterisations of mental shock in the medical, psychological and philosophical discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It outlines how the history of these interdisciplinary exchanges shaped current notions of psychic vulnerability and traumatic stress.
Dr Koch's current research investigates the history of the patient-provider relationship in psychotherapy and psychiatry, and the history of the experimental study of mental illness. Besides holding academic positions, Dr Koch has several years of experience as a clinical psychologist working in addiction treatment. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 2012 and a master's degree in psychology from the University of Zurich in 2006.
