Welcome,
I'm Breeanna Elliott,
Historian & Ethnographer
About
I am an historian-ethnographer who specializes in African studies. I study changes in healing cultures related to environmental shifts, migrations, and technologies in the Western Indian Ocean, with a focus specifically on Madagascar and Tanzania from the 19th century to the present day. Currently, I am a doctoral student in the History of Science and Medicine Program at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in the United States.
Prior to Yale, I received my A.B. in History and African and African American Studies from Harvard College. My secondary field is in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and I earned language citations in Spanish and Swahili. My award-winning undergraduate thesis centered on the legal precarity of enslaved women’s lives during the British abolition campaigns along the Swahili Coast in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I am passionate about teaching across grade levels and earned my grades 8-12 teacher licensure from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2015.
Beyond the academe, I am a certified rescue SCUBA diver and the co-founder of the Adaptive Slacklining Association. I receive daily inspiration from my two feline companions: Nina and Pepsi.
Academic Research
My dissertation is titled, A Spirited Pharmacopeia: Mobile Malagasy Spirits and Medical Knowledge Production in the Western Indian Ocean. My project emphasizes the role of ancestral spirits in histories of regional pharmacopeia, bioprospecting, and disability by recognizing them as active and independent political agents in the cross-cultural negotiations of health, healing, and illness in the Western Indian Ocean (Madagascar and Zanzibar).
My methodologies include ethnography, archival research, oral history, and ethnobotany. I situate myself between the disciplines of anthropology and history, working across the fields of science and technology studies, religious studies, critical disability studies, and the environmental humanities. For this project, I work in French, Malagasy, and Swahili.
My doctoral research and language studies have been generously funded by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Critical Language Scholarship Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright-Hays Program.
Qualifying Exam Fields
