Soile Ylivuori, PhD

Description of research and teaching

Soile Ylivuori (PhD, FRHistS) (she/her) is an Associate Professor of History. Her research interests include the history of the body, materiality and experiences, gender and race in the early modern British Empire, and intersections of cultural history and history of science, including the circulation of knowledge and power.

Research

I'm currently leading two projects:

• Medical Electricity, Embodied Experiences, and Knowledge Construction in Europe and the Atlantic World, c.1740-1840 (ELBOW) (funded by a Horizon Europe ERC Starting Grant, 2022-27) investigates knowledge construction through patients’ embodied experiences of medical electricity in the long eighteenth century.
• The Academy of Finland-funded project Experiencing Agony – Pain and Embodiment in the British Atlantic World, 1600–1900 (2022-26) studies affective everyday experiences of pain and suffering from the early modern to the modern period. 

I've previously held a Core Fellowship at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London, and a Beinecke and Lewis Walpole Library Research Fellowship at Yale, as well as worked as a visiting researcher at UCLA and University of Cambridge.

My publications include the monograph Women and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England (Routledge, 2019) as well as peer-reviewed articles in journals including The Historical Journal and Cultural and Social History. I'm currently in the process of finalising my second monograph on the intersections of Whiteness and tropicality in the Georgian West Indies.

Teaching and supervision

I teach mainly on topics related to early modern cultural history, gender and the body, as well as theoretical and methodological questions. I'm currently a supervisor for Doctoral Programme in History and Cultural Heritage and Doctoral Programme in Gender, Culture, and Society.