Elaine Ayers

Elaine Ayers is a Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University and holds a PhD in the History of Science from Princeton University. Her work focuses on the entangled histories of botany, colonial violence, and collecting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work has been supported by the NEH, NSF, and New York Botanical Garden, among others, and she consults at museums and gardens in repatriation strategies. She is a contributing editor at The Public Domain Review, and her book manuscript explores the history of tropical botany along racial, sexual, and gendered lines.