Elizabeth (Liz) Mellyn is a social and cultural historian with research and teaching interests in the global history of science, medicine, infectious disease, and mental illness from the ancient to the modern world. Primarily trained as a historian of Europe, she also teaches courses on the history of religious conflict as well as power and politics in medieval and early modern Europe.
Mellyn's first book, "Mad Tuscans and their Families," reconstructs the myriad ways families, communities, and civic and medical authorities met in the dynamic arena of Tuscan law courts to forge pragmatic solutions to the problems that madness brought to their households and streets. Her current book project, "Madness in an Early Modern City," reimagines the history of asylums in early modern Europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries from the perspective of public health and healthcare finance. Based on the archives of Tuscany’s first mental hospital, it analyzes a single institution through the eyes of magistrates, hospital founders, administrators and staff, patients and families within the context of an emerging system of public health to capture long-overlooked aspects of early modern European healthcare and healthcare economics.
Mellyn's research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti, the American Academy in Rome, and a collaborative grant between the Modern Language Initiative and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
