elainafoley

Elaina Foley

Through the consideration of rot and decay as relational processes, my work challenges the ideal of preservation within natural history institutions.

In Spring 2023, I graduated from Yale with a double major in the History of Science and Medicine & Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, with distinction in each. I am currently engaged in an 18-month research project from 2023 to 2025 on natural history collections’ preservation and accumulation, supported by the von Humboldt Stiftung and Yale Peabody Museum. This project examines how ‘preservation fetishism’ (Habermas 2023) and colonial accumulation manifest in natural history collections—as well as their material undoings via processes of rot and consumption.

My undergraduate work experience included producing research for Yale Law School's Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic, co-founding Yale’s first undergraduate feminist science and technology studies collective (fSTS@Yale), and cutting back rosebushes at the Brooklyn and New Orleans botanical gardens. As a queer, FGLI student, my work is inevitably informed by a political commitment to prison abolition, mutual aid, and the intertwined liberation of people and land.

Past projects

2024 Talks

“Transforming Collections, Preserving Futures: 2030 at the Museum für Naturkunde,” Making Nature: The Labor of Natural History, American Philosophical Society

“Rot as Relation: Reconsidering Preservation in Natural History Collections,” making and doing transformations, EASST-4S

“A Felt and Measured Threat: Understanding Material (and Existential) Issues in Natural History Collections,” 11th meeting, European Society for the History of Science

“Dangerous Memories: poisonous preservation in/of museums,” Invited Guest Lecture, NYU STS-UY 2914: Ethics of Death and Dying

“A Matter of Feeling: Engaging Specimens’ Materiality and Meaning,” Workshop, Yale Peabody Museum

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