Laura Clerx
Laura Clerx
Ph.D. Candidate
Contact
Stokes Hall South 312
Email: laura.clerx@bc.edu
Education
- A.B., Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Courses
Asia in the World, Modern Atlantic Worlds, World of Early Modern Europe, Globalization, Europe in the World II
Research Interests
Early American Republic; nineteenth-century United States; history of science (scientific knowledge and practice); social structure of science and learned societies in the early national U.S.; material culture and political economy; economic history; environmental history
Advisor
Department
Current Research
Laura Clerx's dissertation, “Nature’s Properties: Science and Commerce in Early America, 1780-1850,” explores the connections between scientific inquiry and commercial enterprise in the early United States. Her project follows scientific society members and their involvement in economic projects from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth century; and argues that understanding these efforts to create a national economy is indispensable to understanding the nature of early American science.
Her research has been supported by the George Washington Presidential Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Rehoboth Antiquarian Society.
She currently serves as senior editorial assistant for the Journal of the Early Republic.
Podcasts and Public History
“Episode 19: Science and Commerce in Early America with Laura Clerx,” Historians and theirHistories: MHS Podcast, Massachusetts Historical Society, October 6, 2025.
“The Common Reed, Phragmites australis”; “Tileston & Hollingsworth Dam”; and “Israel Stoughton Grist Mill” entries in Mapping the Neponset. A digital walking tour of the history of the Neponset River in South Boston, MA. https://neponset.org/mapping-the-neponset-river/. Published December 2024.
Publications
Clerx, Laura Elizabeth. "A Return to our Roots: Countering Epidemic Disease with Plant-Derived Medicine" in The History of Contagion in Harvard Library's Collections. Harvard Library Bulletin 2021. https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37368740.
Clerx, L.E., F.E. Rockwell, J.A., Savage, J.A., and N.M. Holbrook. 2020. Ontogenetic scaling of phloem sieve tube anatomy and hydraulic resistance with tree height in Quercus rubra. American Journal of Botany 107(6): 852-863.
Savage, J.A., S.D. Beecher, L. Clerx, J.T. Gersony, J. Knoblauch, J.M. Losada, K.H. Jensen, M. Knoblauch, and N.M Holbrook. 2017. Maintenance of carbohydrate transport in tall trees. Nature Plants 3: 965-972.