Elizabeth Yale

Yale is a historian of science and the book in the early modern world. She received her PhD in the history of science from Harvard University in 2008. She has previously taught at Harvard and Western Carolina University. She joined the Department of History at Iowa in 2017. Yale is the author of Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain(link is external) (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). She is currently working on a project tracing the afterlives of early modern scientific and medical papers, including their archiving, posthumous publication, and destruction. In tracing these afterlives, this project reveals the roles of families, especially women, in the creation and public communication of scientific and medical knowledge. This material and cultural history of papers also sheds new light on one of the key transformations of the modern world: the emergence of natural science as an activity undertaken towards the public good and of scientists as public figures.

Yale teaches courses on a number of topics in early modern history, including the history of science and medicine, book history, women and gender, and British history. In her courses, she seeks to set European history in its broader global contexts. She also teaches courses in the material analysis of early modern print and manuscript texts through the University of Iowa Center for the Book.