Jessica Hogbin

Jessica Hogbin is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Syracuse University. Her dissertation, “Innumerable Melancholies: Medicine, Mental Health, and Human Nature in Renaissance Italy, 1450-1650,” studies the relationship between medicine, narratives around health, and politics in early modern Italy. Her research considers melancholy, a now-defunct category from humoral theory, as a means of comprehending Renaissance thought around mental and physical well-being, along with conceptions of human nature and the wider natural world.

Before coming to the Science History Institute, Jessica spent two years in Europe conducting research in dozens of archives and libraries. Through the combination of studying individual cases and conducting demographic analysis on large sets of medical data, her scholarship follows the complexity of early modern concerns around mental illness, which simultaneously demonized and glorified certain aspects of melancholia.