Staff profile

Amanda E. Herbert holds the MA and PhD degrees in History from Johns Hopkins University, where she worked under the direction of Prof. John W. Marshall. She completed her BA with Distinction in History and Germanics at the University of Washington, where she worked with Prof. F.J. Levy. She is an historian of the body: gender and sexuality; health and wellness; emotion and feeling; food, drink, and appetite. Her first book, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, was published by Yale University Press in 2014, and won the Best Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. She has published articles in Gender & History, The Journal of Social History, and Early American Studies. From 2017-2021 she served as co-director for Before 'Farm to Table': Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, a $1.5 million Mellon Foundation initiative in collaborative research at the Folger Institute; as part of this project she co-curated an exhibition at the Folger in 2019, "First Chefs: Fame and Foodways from Britain to the Americas." She is an editor for The Recipes Project, an international Digital Humanities project based out of Brock University, Canada, and co-organizer for the SSHRC project Writing Class: Public Engagement and Politics in the New Class History. She is at work on two book projects: Spa Medicine and Body Politics in the British Atlantic, which seeks to refigure and reclaim the early modern spa as an important site for the study of public health; and Leftovers: the Afterlives of Early Modern Food, which explores culinary preservation, foods given in charity, boxing and packaging, reuse and recyling, and faux foods. 

• 2019: Best Article: Judith Walkowitz Prize, North American Conference on British Studies:
• 2015: Best Book: Society for the Study of Early Modern Women & Gender:

Authored book

• Herbert, E. (2014). Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain. Yale University Press

Chapter in book

• Herbert, A. (2022). Spas for the sick poor in the early modern British Atlantic World. In D. Hitchcock, & J. McClure (Eds.), . Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315149271
• Herbert, A. (2021). Creatures of the Bath: Transformations at the Early Modern British Spa. In S. Chiari, & S. Cuisinier-Delorme (Eds.), Spa Culture and Literature in England, 1500-1800. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66568-5
• Herbert, A. E. (2019). English-Irish Social Networks in the Seventeenth Century. In J. A. Eckerle, & N. McAreavy (Eds.), Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland (183-196). University of Nebraska Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvfxvbdk.11

Journal Article

• Herbert, A. E., & Walkden, M. (2023). Hearse Pies and Pastry Coffins: Material Cultures of Food, Preservation, and Death in the Early Modern British World. Global Food History, 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2023.2252665
• Deutsch, T., Gengenbach, H., Herbert, A., & Sweeney, S. (2022). Introduction: Food and Sovereignty. Gender and History, 34(3), https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12673
• Bouchard, J. B., & Herbert, A. E. (2020). One British Thing: A Manuscript Recipe Book, ca. 1690–1730. Journal of British Studies, 59(2), 396-399. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2019.283
• Herbert, A. E. (2018). Queer Intimacy: Speaking with the Dead in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Gender and History, 31(1), https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12370
• Herbert, A. E. (2011). Companions in Preaching and Suffering: Itinerant Female Quakers in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World. Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9(1), https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2011.0000
• Herbert, A. (2009). Gender and the Spa: Space, Sociability and Self at British Health Spas, 1640-1714. Journal of Social History, 43(2), https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.0.0260