Bio
Evan Hepler-Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. Evan is a historian of modern science and technology, specializing in the global history of chemistry, computing and information technology, and environmental health. Evan’s book in progress, Compound Words: Chemists, Information, and the Synthetic World, tells a history of modern chemistry and the global chemicals industry through the making of the taken-for-granted information technologies that divide up the material world into patentable, profitable, governable molecular pieces. Evan is also pursuing research tracing and “remapping” life cycles of chemical substances through modes of production, cultures of use, geographies of toxic exposure, and politics of environmental justice.
Synthetic History: A Chemical Experiment in the Environmental Humanities
The history of chemistry offers plentiful opportunities for experimentation in crafting techniques of humanistic analysis out of past scientific methods. For example, mirroring the ecologists, biologists, and biomedical scientists who used radioisotopes as “tracers” to map out metabolic cycles in bodies and environment, the historian Angela Creager follows the circulation of radioisotope samples as “historical tracers,” mapping pathways linking the US nuclear establishment and twentieth century life sciences. In this talk, I draw on a different historical model, the “synthetical experiments” of nineteenth century organic chemists, to remap the trajectories and interactions of four some noteworthy chemicals of concern: DDT, BPA, CFCs, and PFASs. Borrowing chemical methods to advance the project of environmental humanities will, I hope, help push past the limitations of molecule-by-molecule bureaucratic frameworks for making legal, political, and scientific claims about safety and hazard in the synthetic world.