Elaine M. Ayers

Elaine M. Ayers

Faculty Fellow

Dr. Elaine Ayers works on the intersections between art and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her first book, Strange Beauty, explores the transformation of unsettling plants into illustrations, museum and herbarium objects, and paper technologies from tropical islands to the British and European public and scientific imagination, from museums to pornography. Ayers received her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Princeton University and collaborates with Stanford University / Hamilton College’s Ad Fontes Nature / Natural Things Project. Her work has been funded by the Princeton University Art Museum; the Huntington Library, Art Collection + Botanic Garden; the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology + Medicine; the Yale Center for British Art; the National Science Foundation; and the New York Botanical Garden among other institutions.

Areas of Research

Art / Science Intersections; Scientific Illustration; History of Museums; History of Natural History; Early Modern and Modern Science; Collecting and Collections; Colonial History; Material and Visual Culture; Aesthetics.

Education

Ph.D. (History of Science), 2018, Princeton University

M.A. (History of Science), 2015, Princeton University

B.A. (History of Science, Medicine & Technology), 2011, University of Wisconsin-Madison

 

Publications

2020: “Drowning in Her Sweet Nectar: Plant Carnivory, Colonial Consumption, and the Politics of Floral Flesh in Nineteenth-Century Borneo,” in Natural Things: Ecologies of Knowledge in the Early Modern World, ed. Paula Findlen and Alan Mikhail (under contract).

2019: “The Art and Science of Color in Nineteenth-Century Botany,” in series Devices II, The Site Magazine (under contract).

2019: “Collecting Colonial Curiosities,” Hyperallergic.

2019: “An AI Artist’s Vision of Floral Speculation,” Hyperallergic.

2018: “It Is Disturbing to Find / A Man on the Moon,” in series Conjectures, ed. D. Graham Burnett, The Public Domain Review.

2018: “Noble Rot: On Joseph Arnold and the Discovery of the Corpse Flower,” Cabinet Magazine 64, 71-6.

2018: Review: Ethan Lasser, ed., The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Archives of Natural History 45.2: 379-80.

2018: Review: Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin, eds., Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), Itinerario 42.1: 146-8.

2017: Review: Richard Fulton and Peter Hoffenberg, eds, Oceania and the Victorian Imagination (New York: Palgrave, 2013), British Society for Literature and Science.

2016: “Richard Spruce and the Trials of Victorian Bryology,” The Public Domain Review: Selected Essays, Vol. III (New York: PDR Press), 154-67; and online, 2015.

2015: Review: Marianne Holsbosch, Pointy Shoes and Pith Helmets: Dress and Identity Construction in Ambon from 1850 to 1942 (Leiden, Brill, 2014), Itinerario 39.3: 534-6.

2014: “Hunting Gorillas in the Land of Cannibals: Making Victorian Field Knowledge in Western Equatorial Africa,” The Appendix 2.2: 115-120.