Associate Professor

323 Claudia Cohen Hall, 249 S. 36th Street
M 2-3 W 9:30-10:30 and by appointment

Phone

(215) 898-8210

Education

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
B.A. Yale University

Research Interests

  • history of public health
  • history of infectious diseases, epidemics, and quarantine
  • urban history
  • nineteenth-century Europe
  • public history

Selected Work

The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)

The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (University of California Press, 1995)

"'Until Cleansed and Purified': Landscapes of Health in the Interpermeable World," Change Over Time 6 (2016): 138-152

"Cargo, 'Infection,' and the Logic of Quarantine in the Nineteenth Century," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88 (2014): 75-101

"Targeting Patient Zero," in Flurin Condrau and Michael Worboys, eds., Tuberculosis Then and Now: Perspectives on the History of an Infectious Disease (Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010), 49-71.

“Confronting Sensory Crisis in the Great Stinks of London and Paris,” in William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds., Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

"Scents and Sensibilities: Disgust and the Meanings of Odors in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris," Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 28 (2002): 21-49.

"Historical Perspectives on the Etiology of Tuberculosis," Microbes and Infection 2 (2000): 431-440.

Courses Taught

  • Medicine in History
  • The People's Health
  • Health and Societies: Global Perspectives
  • Epidemics in History
  • Remembering Epidemics
  • Medical Activism and the Politics of Health
  • Current Issues in the History of Medicine
  • Public History
  • Philadelphia: Urban Experience and Public Memory

Faculty Bookshelf