Elisabeth M. Yang

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Biography

Dr Elisabeth Yang is an interdisciplinary scholar, speaker, mentor, teacher, and creative. Elisabeth thrives to reimagine, re-create, and impact in deep and lasting ways, particularly as it affects the lives of infants, children, and their families globally. She is a Wellcome Fellow, early career award recipient, and senior postdoctoral research fellow, based in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science. Elisabeth is trained as a philosopher of religion and ethics, a historian of science and medicine, and a childhood studies scholar. She has decades of experience working and teaching internationally, specifically in South Korea, China, Japan, the US, and the UK.

Elisabeth holds a PhD in Childhood Studies, an MA in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, an MA in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, and a BA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies with a focus on the History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics. She has held prestigious fellowships and posts in various institutions in the US, Korea, and the UK.

Elisabeth is currently the PI of the Wellcome Project: Constructing Moral Babies: The Science of Infancy in Victorian-Era America and Britain (2023-2027). She supervises a postdoctoral research fellow who specialises in history and policy, at the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds.

Elisabeth has published in various fields such as philosophy, history of science and medicine, childhood studies, and Catholic social thought.

Elisabeth is a an amateur thespian and creative, with hands in playing music and creating art.

Research

History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, Material Culture, Childhood Studies, Philosophical Anthropology, Metaphysics, History of Science and Religion, Environment and Health, Developmental Psychology and Infant Mental Health, Catholic Social Thought, History and Philosophy of Mathematics, History of Education

My current work is an intellectual and cultural history of how babies were conceptualised, articulated, portrayed, and treated as moral and spiritual agents in medical, health, and scientific discourses during the long nineteenth-century in America and Britain. My research highlights the convergence and entanglement of metaphysics, morality, theology, politics, and medicine in the context of infant science and infant health. I am very interested in questions of personhood, agency and epistemology as it concerns infants and children. My work also involves the material world and culture of infants and babies—the objects and spaces of babyhood.

Research discipline: Arts, Humanities, and Culture

Cohort year: 2025

Programme: Crucible Programme