Jessica Hogbin

Jessica Hogbin came to the Institute in 2024 as a PhD candidate in the History Department at Syracuse University, where she was studying the relationship between medicine, narratives around health, and politics in early modern Italy. Her dissertation, entitled, “Innumerable Melancholies: Medicine, Mental Health, and Human Nature in Renaissance Italy, 1450–1650,” considers melancholy as a means of comprehending Renaissance thought around mental and physical well-being, along with conceptions of human nature, the wider natural world, and scientific thought. Her dissertation engages with diverse sources, including court cases, medical treatises, letters, and necrologies, as a means of understanding the wide-reaching impact of medical thought on discussions about mental health and the mind.