"The final paradox of the search for purity is that it is an attempt to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction. But experience is not amenable and those who make the attempt find themselves led into contradiction." - Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger

Marcel Boumans is professor of history of economics at Utrecht University. His main research focus is on understanding empirical research practices in the social sciences from an integrated historical and philosophical perspective. He is particularly interested in practices of measurement and modelling, on which he has published two monographs, How Economists Model the World into Number (Routledge 2005) and Science Outside the Laboratory (OUP 2015), and the role of mathematics, about which he has published a Cambridge Element, The Mathematisation of Economics, A Twentieth Century History (CUP 2026. His research project on how we can make sense of data has been completed and will be published in late 2026 under the title Shaping the Phenomena: A Humanist's Construction of Knowledge (Cambridge Scholars). His current project is a situational approach to understanding synthetic data. A Cambridge Element on this topic, Understanding Misinformation, co-authored with Maya Goldenberg and Sabina Leonelli will be published in 2026.

Inaugural adress: Historicism and its Monsters