About
I am a historian of modern Europe, science, and medicine. I study how the sciences of mind were shaped by the institutions and the political and philosophical commitments that produced them, and how they in turn informed European arguments about freedom, the self, and a shared human nature.
I am Visiting Lecturer in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach “The Freudian Century.” I have held fellowships and visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Harvard’s Department of the History of Science, New York University’s Remarque Institute, and the University of São Paulo.
I completed my PhD at University College London, with a dissertation on the transformation from vital to psychic energy in the debate between mechanism and vitalism, a question that runs through both of my books.
From 2013 to 2025 I taught at the University of Essex, latterly as Senior Lecturer and director of the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies. I remain Honorary Senior Lecturer there and direct the Research Group in the History of Psychoanalysis, which I founded in 2018.
My articles have appeared in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, History of the Human Sciences, American Imago, and Psychoanalysis and History.
My first book, Freud and the Legacy of Physiology, is under contract with Princeton University Press and expected in 2027. My second, Minding Energy: Thermodynamics and the Making of Modern Psychology, 1870–1920, is in progress.
I can be reached at lniro@sas.upenn.edu.
Research
Freud and the Legacy of Physiology
The book follows the young Freud into the laboratory. It reconstructs the program of organic physics from its origins in 1840s Berlin to Ernst Brücke’s Institute of Physiology in Vienna, where Freud worked daily from 1876 to 1882 among men he later called his models, and remained engaged with them through the decade that followed. It then traces what those years gave psychoanalysis: a method, a theory of perception, an energetics of mind, and a liberal politics of instinct.
Brücke trained his students to treat the microscope as a medium rather than a neutral window onto nature, one that reveals hidden structure only by also distorting it. Freud carried that logic, transformed but recognizable, from the ganglia of the crayfish to hysterical symptoms and dreams, and in The Interpretation of Dreams modeled the mind itself on the compound microscope. Against the view that he had to outgrow a materialist training, the book reads the institute as the site of his formation (Bildung), whose legacy was at once the condition of possibility of psychoanalysis and the horizon it could not transcend.
Under contract with Princeton University Press. Peer review completed; expected 2027.
Minding EnergyThermodynamics and the Making of Modern Psychology, 1870–1920
The book is a five-country history of how the sciences of mind took up the conservation of energy, a principle that promised to unify nature from matter to mind to society: German experimental psychology and the dispute over psychophysical parallelism (Parallelismusstreit); Viennese neurophysiology in the work of Sigmund Exner, Josef Breuer, and Freud; French psychology from Théodule Ribot to Pierre Janet and Henri Bergson; British psychology from Henry Maudsley to William McDougall; and William James’s Harvard, where Wilhelm Ostwald brought his Energism (Energetik) in 1905.
Psychology became a discipline just as energy conservation was becoming a law for all of nature. The human sciences did not merely receive the principle; they helped settle how far it reached, and mind was the hard case, since a complete unification of nature could not stop short of mental life. Energy served as a common currency across matter, life, mind, and society, coined differently in each tradition that took it up.
In progress. Two chapters have appeared in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.
Introspection and Self-Knowledge
I am concurrently writing on the history of the rise and demise of introspection and inner life. “The Deposed Witness” traces the nineteenth-century collapse of privileged access to one’s own mental states and psychoanalysis’s relocation of self-knowledge from the introspective subject to the analytic relation. It situates this collapse in a Viennese turn against introspection that ran through Brentano, Mach, Gomperz, von Ehrenfels, Husserl, and Freud and on to the Vienna Circle, and argues that the turn had a political background: in late-liberal Vienna, distrust of the introspective witness belonged to a broader demand that authority, scientific or political, answer to public scrutiny. Freud’s own contribution was to turn that rejection of introspection into a new method, in which interiority becomes accessible only externally, through another person.
A companion article, “From Inner Sense to Inner Life: The Making of Psychological Interiority,” offers a longue-durée history of inner life and of its identification with the psychological.
Articles in progress.