Breeanna Elliott is an historian-ethnographer who specializes in African studies. She studies changes in healing cultures related to environmental shifts, migrations, and technologies in the Western Indian Ocean, with a focus specifically on Madagascar and Tanzania from the 19th century to the present-day. Currently, she is a doctoral student in the History of Science and Medicine Program at Yale University.

Prior to Yale, she received her A.B. in History and African and African American Studies from Harvard College. Her undergraduate thesis centered on the legal precarity of enslaved women’s lives during the British abolition campaigns along the Swahili Coast in the 19th and 20th centuries.

She is passionate about teaching across grade levels and earned her grades 8-12 teacher licensure from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2015. Afterward, she directed a federally-funded program to promote African studies in K-12 and community college classrooms and served as the in-country program assistant for a university study abroad program in Zanzibar, Tanzania.

Beyond the academe, Breeanna is a certified rescue SCUBA diver and the co-founder of the Adaptive Slacklining Association. She receives daily inspiration from her two feline companions: Nina and Pepsi.