Academic background

Presentations & Conferences

‘The Untold History of Eating Disorders’ (Inner Citadel Oxford, ‘Speaking Flesh: Mental Health, Literature, and the Poetics of the Body’, 4–part interactive online CPD series for mental health professionals). On sale.

‘Dissolution and Disgust: Collapsing Bodily Boundaries and the Seventeenth-Century “Great Eater of Gray’s Inn”’ (AHRC International Conference ‘Borders and Boundaries’, September 2025)

‘A Shambles he may for the slaughtered’: Social Dissolution and Alimentary Anxiety in Seventeenth-Century Great Eater Narratives (Early Modern Britain Seminar, University of Oxford, March 2025)

‘The Leaky Body in the study of seventeenth-century disordered eating’ (The Leaky Body workshop, University of Kent, January 2025)

‘‘Most vulturous eating’: Maternal appetites and mariticidal cannibals’ (Worcester College History Society, University of Oxford, October 2024)

My DPhil research explores diet, disease, and disordered eating in early modern English medicine and culture. Falling within the fields of medical, cultural, and intellectual history, my research examines what ‘eating disorders’ meant to early modern people, before considering the cultural meanings and anxieties with which they became entangled. I therefore question the conventional depiction of eating disorders as a modern phenomenon, demonstrating that they were a significant source of concern in medical and moral discourse throughout the 1600s.

I graduated with a first-class BA in History and Politics from Jesus College Oxford (2022), with a dissertation on sleep paralysis, sexuality, and the supernatural in early modern England. I also hold an MSt in Early Modern History from Jesus College Oxford (2023). I was awarded the Best Dissertation in Cohort Prize for my thesis ‘More beastliness than beauty: Gendering pica in Early Modern England’, which forms the basis for my DPhil research.

More broadly, I am interested in the intersections between medical and cultural imaginings of the body, experiences of mental and physical ill health, and early modern self-writing.

If you are interested in my research, please drop me an email at helena.aeberli@magd.ox.ac.uk.