Lisa Smith

Dr. Lisa Smith is a Senior Lecturer and Postgraduate Dean in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex. She holds a PhD from the University of Essex (2002), and earlier degrees from the University of Alberta (MA, 1997; B.A., 1995). Her academic career includes a decade at the University of Saskatchewan before returning to Essex in 2015. Dr. Smith’s research focuses on gender, health, and the body in early modern Europe, with particular attention to pain, reproduction, domestic medicine, and food history. She is a leading scholar of Sir Hans Sloane’s correspondence and co-leads the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC), a crowdsourced transcription project. Her work bridges digital humanities and traditional historical inquiry, emphasizing public engagement through blogs like The Recipes Project and collaborations with museums and archives.

Her research interests span comparative history (Britain and France, 1600–1800), digital public engagement, and the intersection of science, medicine, and supernatural beliefs. She has published extensively on topics such as eighteenth-century medical practices, food as identity, and early modern family histories. Current projects include an online database of Sloane’s correspondence and a monograph on European cuisine and British identity. Dr. Smith supervises PhD students on themes like gender, health, and early modern social networks.

She has held editorial roles for journals like the European Journal of Food, Drink and Society and hypotheses.org, and has delivered keynote lectures on topics ranging from seventeenth-century recipes to the sensory experience of plague. Her grants include funding from the British Academy and the University of Essex’s QR Impact Fund for initiatives like the Hungry Human Project.