Elena Lu

Elena Lu is a Ph.D. student in early modern European history, focusing on the intersections between science, history, and religion in post-Reformation Europe, especially France and Italy. Her research considers how different communities of knowers made sense of natural, human, and sacred pasts in tandem, and how that historical knowledge was put to use. Such actors include philologists and naturalists tracing the shared origins of institutions and species, engineers and antiquarians charting silting rivers and shifting coastlines, and ecclesiastical historians on either side of the confessional divide. She is always interested in the question of what made history meaningful and purposeful: the lessons we believe the past can teach.

Before Stanford, Elena completed her A.B. in History and Classics at Harvard University, where she wrote her undergraduate thesis on historicism and Homeric scholarship in 17th- and 18th-century Europe.