Drop-in hours

• Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:45 - 2:45 p.m., Wednesdays 11 a.m. - 12 p.m., or by appointment

Elizabeth Yale is a historian of science and the book in Britain and Europe. She is the author of Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). With Vera Keller and Anna Marie Roos, she co-edited Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives (Brill, 2018). Dr. Yale earned a PhD in the History of Science at Harvard University and taught at Western Carolina University and Harvard before coming to Iowa.

She is currently working on two book projects. The first, in collaboration with James T. Costa (Western Carolina University), is an annotated edition of Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). The second is a study of how early modern learned families created, communicated, and preserved scientific and medical knowledge. Paying close attention to the material practices of communication and record-keeping, she argues that extended household collectives whose members included wives, children, siblings, and servants helped lay the foundations of today’s scientific information infrastructures.

In 2021-2022, she served as the President of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, of which she is a Senior Fellow. In 2016, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Dr. Yale earned a PhD in the History of Science at Harvard University in 2008 and taught at Western Carolina University and Harvard before coming to Iowa. 

Teaching

Dr. Yale teaches courses on early modern European history, the history of science and medicine, book history, women and gender, and British history. She also teaches courses on the material analysis of early modern printed and manuscript texts through the University of Iowa Center for the Book.

With Matthew Brown (Department of English and UICB), she has been awarded an NEH Humanities Initiatives Grant for a three-year project to develop an undergraduate laboratory space and related curriculum that would engage students in the study of global print and manuscript cultures.

Publications

Books

• Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives (2018) Editors Vera Keller, Anna Marie Roos and Elizabeth Yale
• Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (2016)

Articles

• "Teaching women's work and thought in undergraduate history of science courses" History Compass 21.9 (2023).
• “The Perfect True Copy: Manuscript as Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Vernacular English Medical Books” Word & Image 35.3 (2019): 243–255. 
• “A Letter is a Paper House: Home, Family, and Natural Knowledge”  Chapter in Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge (2019) Edited by Carla Bittel, Elaine Leong, Christine von Oertzen.
• “Playing Archival Politics with Hans Sloane, Edward Lhuyd, and John Woodward”  Chapter 5 in Archival Afterlives (2018): 173–193
• “Making Lists: Social and Material Technologies for Seventeenth-Century British Natural History” Chapter in Ways of Making and Knowing (2107) Edited by Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook. 
• “The Book and the Archive in the History of Science" Isis 107.1 (2016)
• “History of Archives: The State of the Discipline”
• Left to Her Own Devices
• “Marginalia, Commonplaces, and Correspondence: The Scribal Culture of Early Modern Science”
• “With Slips and Scraps: How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive”

Commentary and popular writing

• Interview in "Understanding Charles Darwin with Genetics and DNA" Iowa Public Radio (02.18.2020)
• "The Circle’s Old, Tired Narrative of Women Controlled by Technology" The Atlantic (05.09.2017)
• "Astronomy’s Evolving Gender Dynamics" The Atlantic (04.04.2016)
• "The Deep-Rooted Racism of Science" Quartz (03.11.2016)
• "Where Do You Do Your Barnacles? Lessons from Charles Darwin on Working from Home" Quartz (05.28.2015)
• "First Blood Transfusion: A History" The Atlantic (03.03.2015)
• "When Do Official Documents Belong to the Public?"
• "When Do We Say ‘We’ in History?"
• "The Sources of Creationism’s Disjointed Science"
• "Why Anti-Vaccination Movements Can Never Be Tamed"
• "The Mortality of Paper"
• "What the Show Cosmos Gets Wrong About Religion—and Science"