Elly R. Truitt joined Penn in 2020 as an associate professor in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, where she studies the circulation of scientific objects and natural knowledge throughout central and western Eurasia and north Africa, in the medieval period. She has a particular interest in how scientific ideas, practices, and objects traveled and were adapted to new settings, and philosophical treatises, archival material, literary texts, lyric, material objects, and images all inform her work. Her first book, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Penn, 2015), explored the history of automata in medieval Latin culture, where they appeared as gifts from foreign rulers in Baghdad and Damascus and at the courts of Constantinople and Shengdu, and demonstrated that artificial people and animals were ubiquitous in medieval culture, and that they were used to pose questions about identity, liveliness, and the ethics of knowledge and creation. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, and other institutions. She has published articles on the history of automata, the history of timekeeping technology, pharmacobotany, the adoption of Arabic terms and ideas into Latin and English scientific texts, and on concepts of artificial intelligence in the Middle Ages.
In 2016 she was awarded a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to learn Arabic and study medieval manuscript culture in the Islamicate world. This work now informs several of her current projects, including her second book, The Stunning Inventions of Roger Bacon, which deals in part with the Arabic works on which Bacon drew for inspiration. She is also researching the translation of scientific diagrams from Arabic manuscripts into Latin, especially in astral science and optics. Her third book, about courtly science in the medieval world, explores how science and technology (including navigation, alchemy, fine engineering, and divination) were fostered and practiced throughout the medieval world between 750-1400.