Dr Leah Astbury

I am a historian of health, medicine and gender in the period c.1500-1750.

I joined the University of Bristol in August 2024 as Lecturer in Health History. Previously I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the 'Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World' project at the University of Manchester led by Professor Sasha Handley. Between 2018 and 2022 I was a Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge and was the 2017/18 Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at the Huntington Library, San Marino, US. I have held research fellowships from The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and the Society for Renaissance Studies.

Teaching

I currently teach on:

Early Modern World (1st year, UG)

Tudor World (2nd year, UG)

Disease, Disability and Deviance (2nd year, UG)

Sexualities (3rd year, UG)

Approaches to History (MA)

Explorations in Early Modern History (MA)

I would be interested in supervising students who wish to work on early modern social, cultural, gender, medical and environmental history. I am currently particularly interested in animal history and its intersection with histories of race, colonisation and gender in the early modern world.

I am Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.