Elaine Ayers

Elaine Ayers is a lecturer in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine, where she works on the entangled histories of natural history, colonial violence, and collecting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her first book project focuses on botanical collecting in the making of the “tropics,” and her newest project examines systems of loss and ecological entanglement in natural history museums. She has written about corpse flowers, moss, orchids, fungi, and other organisms for publications like Cabinet Magazine, Huntington Library Quarterly, and Atlas Obscura, and she is a contributing editor for The Public Domain Review. In 2024, she launched the NEH-funded digital humanities project Thinking With Moss, alongside Tega Brain and Ahmed Ansari. 

She consults at botanical gardens and natural history museums, and her work has been supported by grants and fellowships ranging from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation to the Yale Center for British Art and the New York Botanical Garden. Before coming to Yale, she taught in Science, Technology and Society at Brown University and at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Program in Museum Studies at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Princeton University.