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AAHM-Gale Digital Humanities Fellows, 2025-2026
Thanks to a partnership with Gale, we are delighted to fund these digital humanities projects spearheaded by our members. We can’t wait to see where these projects go!
Elisabeth M. Yang is a senior postdoctoral research fellow and Wellcome Trust Fellow at the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds. Her Wellcome Project concerns the intellectual and cultural history of a “scientia of infancy”, comprising the medical, pedagogical, scientific, and theological enterprises of infants’ formation and health in America and Britain during the long nineteenth century. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she draws from the history and philosophy of science and medicine, medical humanities, sociology, theology, childhood studies, and material culture. Dr. Yang’s current book project is entitled, Moral Babies: The Medical and Scientific Enterprise of Infancy in America, 1850s-1920s; she has published in the fields of philosophy, childhood studies, histories of childhood and developmental psychology, and women’s history, with writings featured in Women’s History Today; Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies, and the Journal of Catholic Social Thought.
For the AAHM-Gale DH fellowship, Dr. Yang will draw from digitized collections and sources as well as reinforce digital humanities theories and tools to further investigate the theoretical and practical figurations of the idealized “happy and healthy baby” and the imagined “moral baby” in American childrearing, medical, and scientific discourses from the 1850s-1920s.
Francis Newman is a PhD candidate in Harvard’s History of Science Department. His dissertation explores the relationship between human bodies and our environments, especially in Taiwan and China during the nineteenth century. He examines how different elements of society dealt with, and re-imagined, the dangers presented by disease and the weather.
With this fellowship, Francis is looking forward to studying medical meteorology, a mid-nineteenth century attempt to understand the relationship between disease and climate using atmospheric instruments and weather data. He asks how European and American physicians established a colonial knowledge network that attempted to understand disease meteorologically, and in particular, how Chinese environments shaped the credibility of these medical meteorological observations.
Bethany L. Johnson (Ph.D.) has a doctorate in the history of science, technology, and the environment from the University of South Carolina. She is an Affiliate Faculty in the Health & Medical Humanities program and the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Johnson examines how public health experts, medical practitioners, and the general public have communicated differently about states of health and infectious diseases from the nineteenth century to the present. Specifically, Johnson studies the history of epidemics and reproductive health. Her work appears in a range of journals including Social History of Medicine, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, Women’s Reproductive Health, and Health Communication. Her book, co-authored with Dr. Margaret M. Quinlan, You’re Doing it Wrong! Mothering, Media, and Medical Expertise is available through Rutgers University Press.
Johnson’s project for the AAHM Gale Digital Fellowship is a comparative study examining the post-viral health consequences of the 1890s influenza pandemic and the 1918 influenza pandemic. Johnson will investigate how doctors and patients perceived themselves and their health following infection, how media sources, such as newspapers, reported survivor experiences, and which medical problems emerged in the aftermath of both outbreaks. The study will highlight the importance of post-viral health narratives in the history of epidemics, as well as for public health communication in the present.
