Baylee Staufenbiel

Baylee Staufenbiel is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Florida State University specializing in the history of medicine, science, and knowledge in medieval and early modern Europe. Her research examines how ideas about the human body moved across disciplinary, linguistic and cultural boundaries. Her dissertation, "Epistemic Mobility and the Generative Body: The Seven-Cell Uterus Doctrine in Premodern Networks of Knowledge," traces the transmission and transformation of the seven-cell uterus doctrine across medical, philosophical, theological, cosmological and vernacular traditions. She is currently researching Michael Lyser’s lesser-known 17th-century dissection manual, Culter Anatomicus, and has submitted articles on anatomical pedagogy in Mondino de Liuzzi’s Anathomia, generation and morality in the vernacular Book of Sydrac, and the relationship between medieval knowledge systems and contemporary artificial intelligence. Her research has been supported by the Walbolt Dissertation Fellowship, the Edward Worth Library Research Fellowship in Dublin, a History of Medicine Collections Research Grant from Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution at FSU. She is also a recipient of the Leitch Wright Jr. Award for Outstanding Research, awarded for excellence in doctoral historical writing. In addition to her research, Baylee has independently designed and taught courses in world history, historical methods and the history of medicine. She received the history department’s Joe Richardson Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2025. Her teaching emphasizes historical networks and the movement of people, goods, ideas, diseases, texts, and knowledge, while finding creative ways to introduce students primary source analysis and historical argumentation. She also mentors undergraduate research through Florida State University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. Baylee currently serves as the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Essay Contest Coordinator and has been extensively involved in graduate student service. She has served as a graduate representative on the History Department’s Faculty Graduate Committee and on a tenure-track faculty search committee. She also served as treasurer of the History Graduate Student Association, and as an organizer of the Association’s Southeast Regional Graduate Student Conference for multiple years. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Baylee received her M.A. in History from the University of Wyoming with a minor in gender and women’s studies. She received her B.A. from the University of Washington in History and medical anthropology and global health with a minor in classical studies. Her work brings together intellectual history, the history of medicine, manuscript studies, vernacular textual traditions, and digital approaches to the history of knowledge.