Lilith Todd studies 17th- and 18th-century British, American, and Caribbean literature, care work in the past and present, and poetics across literary forms. Her writing can be found in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, The Journal for Medical Humanities, and PMLA. She also occasionally reviews for Graphic Medicine, Full Stop, and Synapsis. 

Her current book project, Care Work: Nursing and Writing, 1650-1800, traces nursing as a set of highly generative material and literary practices in the long eighteenth century. During this period, the term “nursing” referred to a wide-range of activities from the intimate act of breastfeeding a child to washing soiled sheets or watching over someone confined in a hospital: what we would today call care work. To write the history of this work, the book brings together culturally central genres of the long eighteenth century – the biblical epic, the natural history, the georgic, the devotional lyric, and the unfinished novel – with the many other kinds of text people produced while taking care of others' bodies – medical treatises, cookbooks, domestic manuals, case notes, registries, and hospital records. The book argues that nursing produces bodily knowledge and social relationships through a set of practices that are repetitive, cyclical, and sensual, and that many eighteenth-century texts adopt formal, poetic, and representational strategies that reproduce these processes of coming to know bodies in relation to one another: the violent drudgery of medical care in the Caribbean finding refraction in the tedium of the medical catalog and the scattered attentions of parish wet nurses being given voice in the fragmented manuscript of an antiphonal prayer. Research for this project has been supported with fellowships at the Lewis Walpole Library, The John Carter Brown Library, and the Winterthur Museum, Library, and Gardens. 

She is also at work on two other projects. With Cynthia Richards, she is editing a forthcoming volume entitled Literature as Clinic: Eighteenth-Century Patient Narratives, which looks to what eighteenth-century literary texts and medical practices can teach us about humanistic methods in medicine today. A second book project, tentaively titled Workplace Injuries, will examine the multiple kinds of bodily losses, dispossessions, and alienations under the course of labor, from pregnancy and birth, parasitic infections associated with the slave trade, to other kinds of on-site injuries from various employments. 

Before coming to the University of Pennsylvania, she taught in Columbia’s core curriculum and served as managing editor of Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and B.A. in History and in English (with honors) from Brown University.