Elaine Leong is associate professor of History at University College London. Prior to joining UCL History, she held a Minerva Professorship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin where she led a research group on the theme of “Reading and Writing Nature in Early Modern Europe”. Her work has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Wellcome Trust, and she has held visiting fellowships at the Huntington Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library.  

Elaine Leong is a historian of medicine, science and technology with a focus on the production and transmission of everyday knowledge. Her first book, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2018) won the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize in 2019. Using a range of sources such as recipe books, letters and more, the book brings into focus what she terms ‘household science’ – that is, quotidian investigations of the natural world – and situates these within broader and current conversations about gender and cultural history, the history of the book, the history of archives and the history of science, medicine and technology. She has also written and edited books on translation and medicine (Osiris, 2022), handbooks and manuals in histories of science (BJHS Themes, 2020), gender, knowledge and paper practices (Pittsburgh, 2019), testing drugs and trying cures (BHM, 2017), and secrets and knowledge (Ashgate, 2011). 

During her HIAS fellowship, she will be working on her second book project tentatively entitled “Reading Rivière in Early Modern England”. The project seeks to understand the making of vernacular and learned natural knowledge, particularly knowledge about health and the body, through examining reading and writing practices as epistemic processes. By examining processes such as the writing down of oral knowledge, textual translation, commercial printing and note-taking practices, it analyzes how knowledge is transformed or “maintained” through pen and paper practices and reconstructs convoluted itineraries of knowledge transfer. In so doing, the project questions the process and impact of vernacularization – destabilizing categories such as “learned” and “lay”, “domestic” and “commercial”, as well as notions of a distinctly “English” medical tradition. The project aims to make two major interdisciplinary interventions. First, it posits that paying attention to the “knowledge itineraries” of book production and consumption will offer us new insight into early modern knowledge codification. Second, the charting of these longue durée “knowledge itineraries” turns our focus away from the study of innovation and novelty to the investigation of “knowledge maintenance”. This focus on concepts of “knowledge maintenance”, it is argued, offers a new perspective to the traditional historical question of change and continuity, encouraging us to interrogate the epistemic processes and driving forces through which the continuity of knowledge practices was maintained. 

Her collaboration partner is Markus Friedrich, Professor of European History at Universität Hamburg.

Elaine Leong’s HIAS fellowship is funded by the ZEIT STIFTUNG BUCERIUS.