Dr Lisa Smith
Chair
Lisa Smith is Chair of the Society. A Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, she is a historian of medicine and gender in England and France (ca. 1650-1820) who has published widely on gender, embodiment, health, and the household. She is also a digital historian, with longstanding projects on Early Modern Recipes Online Collective and The Sloane Letters. She has written on recipes, remedies, and food; loneliness, pain, and trauma; leaky bodies; fertility and infertility; gendered caregiving; doctor-patient relationships; and crowdsourced recipe transcription. Her recent publications include the edited volume A Cultural History of Medicine in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2021) and an award-winning article (with Cathy McClive) ‘Women at the centre: medical entrepreneurialism and ‘la grande médecine’ in eighteenth-century Lyon’ (2024). She is completing a monograph for a British Academy-funded project (with Adam Crymble, Sarah Fox and Rachel Rich) on Britishness, empire, and food in the households of George III and George IV (forthcoming UCL Press, 2025).
She is also keen to work with non-academic audiences, having blogged in several venues (e.g. The Conversation), participated in the Being Human Festival, delivered various local history lectures, and worked with several archives on public engagement through transcription projects.