Embodiment, Emotion, and Environment in Early Modern England

Dr Rachel Winchcombe is a cultural historian of early modern England and America.

Her PhD research focused on early English encounters with the New World in the sixteenth century, analysing how English understandings of the new lands across the Atlantic impacted early English colonial decisions. Her postdoctoral work on the AHRC-funded project 'How We Used to Sleep' explored how perceptions and practices of sleep were transformed in the early modern period and how sleep’s cultural value, in times past and present, is intimately tied to sleep quality. More recently her research, provisionally titled 'Emotional Eating in the Early American Colonies' explores the interplay between diet and emotional states in English accounts documenting dietary change in the American colonies.