Taylor Moore

Taylor M. Moore is a historian of science, technology, and medicine. Her first book, under contract with Duke University Press, rewrites the history of modern Egypt through an archive of talismans and charms and the people that used them. She is also at work on a project tracing the history of rural bodies as environmental technologies in Egypt and their impact on the global historical imagination in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. As a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, Moore is developing interests in the material history of the book, especially the history of papermaking and paper conservation in the Ottoman world.

Moore’s work has been published in the American Historical Review, Isis, History of the Present, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Moore received her BA in Honors Political Science and Sociology from the American University in Cairo in 2013, and her PhD in History from Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 2020. Before coming to Yale, she was an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow (2020), and an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (2021-2023).  

Publications

“Of Knots and Needles,” W86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 32, no. 1 (2025): 104-109

“‘Living Fossils: Anatomies of Race and Reproduction in Modern Egypt,” American Historical Review 130, no. 1 (2025): 19-52

“An (Un)Natural History: Tracing the Magical Rhinoceros Horn in Egypt,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 114, no. 3 (2023): 469-489

                            º 2024 Price/Webster Prize from the History of Science Society

                            º 2024 David Edge Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science  

“Occult Epidemics,” History of the Present 13, no. 1 (2023): 87-100

“The Cool Air,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 53, no. 1 (2023): 86-90

 “Introduction: Dilemmas of Archival Objectivity,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 53 no. 1 (2023): 71-72. Co-authored with Henry Cowles and Chitra Ramalingam

“Ethnography,” In “Sciences of Dune,” Los Angeles Review of Books (March 2022)

“Betraying Behita: Superstition and the Paralysis of Blackness in Out el Koloub’s Zanouba,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 54, no. 1 (2022): 148-159

“Abdel Rahman Ismail’s Tibb al-Rukka and the Nubian Medicine Bundle: Toward Material Histories of Contagion,” Harvard Library Bulletin (February 2022)