Baylee Staufenbiel

Why FSU?

I chose FSU for the opportunity to work with Dr. Cathy McClive, whose approach to the history of medicine and the body offered the kind of interdisciplinary mentorship I knew I needed and wanted.

Motivation to pursue a graduate degree

I pursued graduate study because I wanted to understand how people in the past made sense of the body, medicine, and the natural world. As my research developed, I became particularly interested in how medical knowledge moved across texts, disciplines, and communities.

Importance and/or impact of research and work

My research examines how ideas about the human body moved across the intellectual cultures of medieval and early modern Europe. My dissertation traces the seven-cell uterus doctrine, a model of reproductive anatomy that circulated for centuries across medicine, natural philosophy, theology, literature, and visual culture. By following the doctrine across disciplinary, linguistic, and geographic boundaries, I show how knowledge acquired new meanings as it moved between different communities and contexts. This history challenges linear narratives of scientific change by revealing how inherited ideas remained productive even as the intellectual worlds around them changed.

Who has been influential in your graduate journey?

My advisor Dr. Cathy McClive has had the greatest influence on my development as a historian. She taught me to pursue difficult questions across disciplinary and geographic boundaries and encouraged me to follow the evidence even when it led beyond the categories in which a project began. That approach has fundamentally shaped both my dissertation and the kind of historian I have become.

Career aspirations

I hope to become a professor of medieval and early modern history, where I can continue both researching and teaching the subjects that interest me most. I plan to turn my dissertation into a book and continue exploring how medical and scientific knowledge moved between people, places, and disciplines.

Advice for anyone considering graduate school

Choose your advisor as carefully as you choose your program, and be willing to follow your research in directions you never expected. If you travel for research, remember to leave the archive sometimes—explore the city, have fun, and enjoy the places your work takes you!

Accomplishments during graduate career

I am most proud of receiving the History department's J. Leitch Wright, Jr. Award for Excellence in Research and the Joe Richardson Award for Excellence in Teaching. Receiving recognition for both has been especially meaningful because my work as a historian has always involved both producing knowledge and communicating it to others. I am proud that both my teaching and my research were well received, because I care about both.

2026: J. Leitch Wright, Jr. Award for Excellence in Research (Ph.D.), FSU History

2025: National Science Foundation Grant for the History of Science Society Annual Meeting (Nov) 2025: The Dan and Sylvia Walbolt Dissertation Fellowship (Fall 2025) FSU History 2025: Joe Richardson Award for Excellence in Teaching FSU History

2024: Rubenstein Library Grant, History of Medicine, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 2024: Ermine M. Owenby, Jr. Award, College of Arts & Sciences, Florida State University

2023: Edward Worth Library Research Fellowship, Dublin, Ireland (September-October 2023) 2023: Foundation Scholarship, Institute on Napoleon & French Revolution, FSU

2022: American Historical Association Travel Grant

2020: Adelaide D. Wilson Fellowship Endowment Fund, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL Entered the program with a Annabel Horward Fellowship funded by the Institute on Napoleon & the French Revolution

Organizations you are part of at FSU

History Graduate Student Association (HGSA) Omicron Delta Kappa (ODK) Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution (INFR) Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS)

Hobbies outside academics

Spending time with my cat, usually on her terms.