Dr Elaine Leong

Elaine Leong joined the department in 2019 and holds a Wellcome University Award. She comes to UCL from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin where she led the Minerva Research Group ‘Reading and Writing Nature in Early Modern Europe’ from 2012 to 2019. 

Elaine’s research is centered upon medical and scientific knowledge transfer and production. Her first book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2018) was awarded the 2019 Margaret W. Rossiter Prize by the History of Science Society. 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. 

Her current book project Reading Rivière in Early Modern England, uses the story of Lazare Rivière’s (1589-1655) bestselling Praxis medica/The Practice of Physick to explore reading and writing practices as processes of knowledge production, maintenance and transfer. She is also working on a Wellcome Trust funded project, ‘Technologies of Health c. 1450-1750’, which aims to recover histories of everyday health objects such as warming stones and medical adverts. As part of this, Elaine co-convenes the ‘Objects, Images and Spaces in Health’ working group at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. 

Elaine also has interests in digital history and co-directs ‘Reading Early Medicine’ – a website, centred on a bibliographical database, which fosters the teaching and research of early modern medicine. Since 2012, she has also served on the steering committee of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective which fosters citizen transcriptions of handwritten recipe texts. From 2012-2019, Elaine was a co-founder and co-editor of the popular history blog The Recipes Project.

Grants, fellowships and awards

Elaine’s research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust and the Max Planck Society and she has held research fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. Her article ‘Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household’, (Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2008) was awarded the 2009 J. Worth Estes Prize by the American Association for the History of Medicine and the 2010 Jerry Stannard Award.

PhD supervision

Elaine is interested in supervising PhD students working on early modern history of science, medicine and technology, gender history and book history. She has particular interests in the history of the everyday and of the domestic sphere, print and manuscript cultures, histories of archives and of note-taking, and translation and processes of vernacularization. 

Major publications

• Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
• Translating Medicine Across Premodern Worlds, co-edited with Tara Alberts and Sietske Fransen, Osiris, 37 (2022).
• A Cultural History of Medicine in the Renaissance, co-edited with Claudia Stein (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).
• ‘Learning by the Book: Manuals and Handbooks in the History of Science’, co-edited with Angela Creager and Mathias Grote, BJHS Themes 5 (2020).
• Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge, co-edited with Carla Bittel and Christine von Oertzen (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
• ‘Testing Drugs and Trying Cures’, co-edited with Alisha Rankin, Special Issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 91 (2), 2017.
• Secrets and Knowledge: Medicine, Science and Commerce 1500-1800, co-edited with Alisha Rankin, (Ashgate Publishing, 2011).

For a full list of publications, see Elaine’s profile.

Teaching

• Learning Early Modern Medicine by the Book
• Gender and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
• Gender, Sex and Bodies in Early Modern England

Contact information

Email: e.leong@ucl.ac.uk

Twitter: @HistoryElaine

Office: 112, 26 Gordon Square

Student support & feedback hours: in-person on Tuesdays 12:00-13:30 or by appointment on Zoom

Student support & feedback hours are an opportunity for students to chat with their module tutors about their ideas, any support they might need with the module, and to go through feedback from their assessments. 

Qualifications

DPhil Oxford, 2006

External Roles

• Subject editor for History of Medicine: History Compass
• Co-editor of the ‘Social Histories of Medicine’ Book Series at Manchester University Press
• Co-editor of Osiris
• Editorial Boards: Renaissance and Reformation; Journal for the History of Knowledge; Social History of Medicine