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WOMEN, GENDER, AND CULTURE IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD
SPEAKER: Alisha Rankin, Tufts University
Alisha Rankin joined the Tufts history department in January 2008, after spending three years as a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2005 and a B.A. from Wellesley College in History and German Studies in 1996.
She is the author of Panaceia's Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which examines German princesses who became widely known and admired for their medical knowledge in the sixteenth century – and particularly for making medicinal cures. It won the 2014 Gerald Strauss Prize for Reformation History. She has also co-edited a collection of essays titled Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500-1800, which was published by Ashgate Press in 2011.
Her latest book, The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (University of Chicago Press, 2021), looks at the important role poison antidotes played in attempts to evaluate early modern cures – and in the development of early modern experiment more broadly. It was excerpted in Lapham's Quarterly in January 2021. While working on the book, she co-led the working group "Testing Drugs and Trying Cures in Early Modern Europe" at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and co-organized (with Elaine Leong) a conference on the topic in June 2014. She and the other organizers published a special journal issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Summer, 2017) on the topic.
Future projects include a study of time and medicine in early modern Europe and a longue durée study of the use of prisoners for medical experiments. She is also co-editing the volume on Early Modern Medicine for the Cambridge History of Medicine.