- Elaine LaFay
- Position:
Assistant Professor of History; and Co-director of the RCHA seminar, "Ugly: Bodies, Aesthetics, and the Politics of the Unpleasant"
- Degree:
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
- Specialty:
Environmental history, 19th Century US history
- at Rutgers:
since 2020
- Bio:
I am a historian of climate and the body, specializing in the nineteenth-century United States. My current research seeks to understand the entanglements between climatology, medicine, and imperialism. My first book project, Debility and Power: How Climate Knowledge Made the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South, provides a new perspective on American expansion into the southern borderlands. It reveals that U.S. expansion was an imperial experiment, in both senses of the term. Testing scientific ideas about climate, vegetation, and health was central to imperial practice. This knowledge was useful to a diverse set of actors: boosters recruiting white settlers to contested land; both enslavers and enslaved people seeking to shape the built environment of plantations; medical practitioners, white settlers, abolitionists, and formerly enslaved people confronting experiences of debility; and speculators, physicians, and the state promoting popular fantasies about the commercial and medical promise of tropical America. I ultimately argue that settler colonialism was predicated on an experimentalism that turned parts of the tropics into laboratories for bodies and plants. This research has received grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, the American Meteorological Society, the Mellon Foundation, and several other institutions. I am also interested in the history of epidemics; health tourism; disability in antebellum America; the environmental history of death; gender & sexuality; and botanical knowledge in the Atlantic World. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, I earned my PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in History with highest honors from the University of Michigan.
