Dr. Melissa Reynolds is a cultural historian of medieval and early modern Europe with broad research interests in the history of medicine and science, the history of gender and the body, and the history of material texts. In her research and teaching, she is particularly interested in tracing how elite or learned cultures of medical and scientific knowledge are conveyed to ‘ordinary’ people through non-elite media, and in turn, how access to this knowledge brought about cultural change. Her first book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print, was published by the University of Chicago Press in August 2024. Reading Practice was awarded the 2025 John Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies and has been shortlisted for the 2026 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine.

Reynolds is Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History at TCU where she teaches courses on early modern European history, on the history of medicine and science, and on digital humanities. She was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center and Lecturer in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylsvania and the Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in History at Princeton University.

To learn more about her research and read other publications, visit melissabreynolds.com.