Libby O’Neil

Libby is a PhD candidate in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. She studies the intellectual and social history of systems theory in the 20th century, with a focus on the contributions of émigrés from Central Europe. Systems theorists, especially in the postwar years, attempted to develop scientific theories that could bridge the disciplinary differences and political divisions of the 20th century. Her dissertation, “The Sciences of Unity: Organicist Systems Thinking Between Vienna and the United States, 1900-1980,” takes a transnational approach to the history of science, following the careers of Austrian, Hungarian, German, and American intellectuals involved in the development of systems theory. In her research, she asks how technical debates about science interacted with larger questions about democracy, faith, governance, and the status of the human in (post)modernity.