Elizabeth Polcha

Elizabeth Polcha is Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Drexel University. Her research and pedagogy are focused on the political nexus of race, gender, and colonialism in histories of science and technology. Her book project, Venus in Transit: Gendered Violence and the Production of Natural History centers African and Indigenous women who were objects of inquiry and coerced participants in eighteenth-century Atlantic world natural sciences. The book intervenes into interdisciplinary scholarship on Enlightenment-era science by uncovering how the domination of women was tied to the domination of the natural world, in both imperialist expansion as well as within the visual and rhetorical modes of natural history. Her research has been supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Carter Brown library, and the American Antiquarian Society.

Dr. Polcha’s digital humanities work includes contributions to the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, the Women Writers Project, and Our Marathon: the Boston Bombing Digital Archive. She co-founded Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies, a digital publication that publishes anti-colonial perspectives on the early Americas, and that prioritizes the writing of contingent and early career researchers as well as library and museum workers. In 2022, Dr. Polcha collaborated with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History on a digital exhibit on Black photography and the history of slavery in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

You can find Dr. Polcha’s writing on science, literature, and the digital humanities in Early American Literature, ASAP/J, Lady Science, Reviews in Digital Humanities, and Digital Humanities Quarterly.