Rate My Professor Taylor M. Moore

Taylor M. Moore is a historian of science, race, and gender in the modern Middle East who served as Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 2022 to 2025. She earned a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in 2020 and a dual B.A. in Honors Political Science and Sociology from the American University in Cairo. Her career includes appointments as UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in History at UCSB from 2020 to 2021, Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 2021 to 2023, and Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School from 2023 to 2025. She is currently a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for 2025 to 2026 and will join Yale University as Assistant Professor in the Department of History and History of Science and Medicine starting July 2026.

Moore’s research interests lie at the intersections of critical race and gender studies, decolonial materiality, and histories of science, technology, medicine, and the occult in the non-West, with a focus on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. Her first book, Amulet Tales: Magic and the Making of Modern Egypt, is under contract with Duke University Press. Scholarship has appeared in the American Historical Review (“Living Fossils,” 2025), Isis (“An (Un)Natural History: Tracing the Magical Rhinoceros Horn in Egypt,” 2023—which received the 2024 David Edge Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science and the Price/Webster Prize from the History of Science Society), History of the Present (“Occult Epidemics,” 2023), Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (“The Cool Air,” 2023), International Journal of Middle East Studies (“Betraying Behita,” 2022), Harvard Library Bulletin (“Abdel Rahman Ismail's Tibb al-Rukka,” 2022), and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her work has received Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, Social Science Research Council funding, and Council for American Overseas Research Centers funding. Moore has presented public lectures on topics including the natural sciences in early modern Morocco and dissecting blackness in early-twentieth-century Egypt.