Dr Trish Ross

PhD, Duke University, 2017; M.A., Yale University, 2010; B.S., summa cum laude, University of Scranton, 2007

Trish Ross is a postdoctoral research fellow whose interests include the history of religion, the history science, intellectual history, and European and global history. She joined the Institute of Advanced Studies in 2017 as part of Peter Harrison’s  Australian Laureate Fellowship project on “Science and Secularization.”

As part of that project, Trish will investigate a set of largely overlooked early modern sources calling themselves “anthropologia,” which demonstrate early modern thinkers operating across what are today considered to be distinct disciplines, integrating empirical research and experimentation with intricate natural philosophy and complicated theologies. It will explore the connections between these works and the emergence of 19th and 20th Century anthropology, providing an as yet untold history of the pre-modern study of human persons that shaped modern social science in ways as yet poorly understood.

She also continues to publish material related to her dissertation entitled “Care of Bodies, Cure of Souls: Medicine and Religion in Early Modern Germany.” There she investigated overlapping explanations of the relationship of body and soul by natural philosophers, physicians, and religious thinkers and how this relationship affected explanations of disease and treatment.

A list of Trish Ross's engagement activities can be found here.