
Dr Leah Astbury
BA, MPhil, PhD
Expertise
Current positions
Lecturer in History of Health
Department of History (Historical Studies)
Contact
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Research interests
I am a historian of health, medicine and gender in the period c.1500-1750.
I joined the University of Bristol in August 2024 as Lecturer in Health History. Previously I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the 'Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World' project at the University of Manchester led by Professor Sasha Handley. Between 2018 and 2022 I was a Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge and was the 2017/18 Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at the Huntington Library, San Marino, US. I have held research fellowships from The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and the Society for Renaissance Studies.
My first book Making Babies in Early Modern England was published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.
I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Teaching
In 2025/6 I am teaching on:
Disease, Deviance and Disability (2nd year, UG)
Tudor World (2nd year, UG)
Sexualities (3rd year, UG)
Medicine, Magic and Sex in Early Modern England and its Colonies (3rd year, UG)
Explorations in Early Modern History (MA)
I would be interested in supervising students who wish to work on early modern social, cultural, gender, medical and environmental history. I am currently particularly interested in animal history and its intersection with histories of race, colonisation and gender in the early modern world.
I am Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Publications
Selected publications
29/01/2026Making Babies in Early Modern England
Making Babies in Early Modern England
Recent publications
05/02/2026Health and Medicine
A Cultural History of Gender in the Early Modern World
Making Babies in Early Modern England
Making Babies in Early Modern England
Farmyard medical encounters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and North America
Medical Encounters in the Early Modern World
Medical Encounters in the Early Modern World
Medical Encounters in the Early Modern World
Eat, Sleep, Lust, Repeat
Cultural and Social History