A Medievalist at the Natural History Museum

Event details

Medieval Literatures Seminar with speaker Dr Isabel Davis (Natural History Museum, London)

Isabel Davis trained as a late medievalist at York’s Centre for Medieval Studies (1997-2002). Via one of the ‘squiggly careers’ that academics, like many others, now experience, she has ended up as a researcher and Research Leader at the Natural History Museum in London, an Enlightenment and modern science institution with little apparent interest in the Middle Ages.

In this talk she reflects on the place of the medieval in natural science collections and environmental history. How can medieval studies help rethink prevailing understandings of history, science and nature and make its contribution to current environmental challenges?

About the speaker

Isabel Davis is a Research Theme Leader in Collections and Culture at the Natural History Museum, London. She is a free-time-travelling cultural historian, although she began in the late Middle Ages. Her recent work focuses on the history of human fertility health in environmental perspective. She is the author of Conceiving Histories: Trying for Pregnancy, Past and Present (MIT Press, 2025). The book is illustrated by long-term collaborator, artist Anna Burel, and is shortlisted for the V&A Illustration Awards 2026.