Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: urban environment, senses, smell, history of science, history of medicine, public health, built environment, United States, 19th century

About Me: I am a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, with a focus on urban environmental change. My interests include culture, environments, cities, health, science, and smells. Lots of smells.

My book, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America, uncovers how city residents used their noses to understand, adjust to, and fight against the environmental changes created by rapid urban growth and industrialization.

Recent Publications: Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017)

Co-authored with Kristoffer Whitney, “Introduction: Counting on Nature,” Science as Culture 26, no. 1 (2017): 1-10.

“Preserving the Unpleasant: Sources, Methods, and Conjectures for Odors at Historic Sites,” Future Anterior 13, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 22-31.

“Navigating by Nose: Stench Nuisance and the Urban Environment, 1840-1880,” Journal of Urban History 42, no. 4 (2016): 753-771.

“The Smell Detectives,” Chemical Heritage 29, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 32-36.