Breeanna Elliott

Breeanna is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science and Medicine Program. She studies changes in healing cultures related to environmental shifts, migrations, and technologies in the Western Indian Ocean, with a focus specifically on Madagascar and Tanzania from the 19th century to the present day.

Her dissertation is titled, A Spirited Pharmacopeia: Mobile Malagasy Spirits and Medical Knowledge Production in the Western Indian Ocean. The project emphasizes the role of ancestral spirits in histories of regional pharmacopeia, bioprospecting, and disability by recognizing them as active and independent political agents in the cross-cultural negotiations of health, healing, and illness in the Western Indian Ocean (Madagascar and Zanzibar). Her methodologies include ethnography, archival research, oral history, and ethnobotany. She situates herself between the disciplines of anthropology and history, working across the fields of science and technology studies, religious studies, critical disability studies, and the environmental humanities. For this project, she works in French, Malagasy, and Swahili.

Her doctoral research and language studies have been generously funded by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Critical Language Scholarship Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright-Hays Program.

Prior to Yale, Breeanna received her A.B. in History and African and African American Studies with a secondary field in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard College. She wrote her undergraduate thesis on the legal precarity of enslaved women’s lives during the 19^th and 20^th century British-led abolition along the Swahili Coast. She is passionate about education and earned her teacher licensure from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2015.