Kim Hajek

Research Fellow, Munich

Kim M. Hajek joined the Ethical Data Initiative (EDI) in 2024 as a postdoctoral fellow based at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where she is part of Sabina Leonelli’s Chair group for Philosophy and History of Science and Technology. Together with Paul Trauttmansdorff, Kim primarily works on the EDI’s educational pillar, notably running ‘data clinics’ that bring together TUM students with partners and practitioners to collaborate on real-world ethical challenges and decision-making processes.

Kim’s interdisciplinary research draws on concepts and methods from narrative theory, history of science, and intellectual history to scrutinise scientific knowledge-making and its cultural products. Her current project examines textual ‘datafication’ in psychotherapy research between ca. 1880 and 1960. It asks how textual practices intersect with and contribute to the epistemic function of different forms of case-writing. 

Having worked in five countries, Kim is passionate about internationalism, diversity, and multilingualism in discussions around data. She previously co-edited the volume Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800, which can be downloaded open access, and came out of the Narrative Science Project at the London School of Economics (LSE). Kim has also published research on the history of hypnotism, case histories in psychotherapy, the language of scientific virtues, and experimental laser physics, and undertaken postdoctoral research at Leiden University (in the project Scholarly Vices–A Longue Durée History) and the Vossius Center for the History of Science and the Humanities (Amsterdam).

Kim serves on the editorial advisory boards of the history of science journals Isis and Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, was previously an Associate Editor of Centaurus (2019–2023), and sits on the Executive Board of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences.