Elaine Ayers is a lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University and holds a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Princeton University. She works on the entangled histories of natural history, colonial violence, and collecting. Her book projects focus on botanical collecting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and on the history of natural history museums. Elaine’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Yale Center for British Art, and the New York Botanical Garden, among others, and she has written for publications like Slate, Cabinet Magazine, and The Public Domain Review.