Current Research and Scholarly Interests
I am currently using the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library to explore the history of cigarette design; this includes physical and chemical manipulations by tobacco industry chemists, but also the history of cigarette marketing and the kinds of images used to sell cigarettes. I'm also looking at how and why different professional groups have worked for cigarette manufacturers.
Other topics I work on include human origins and evolutionary theory, the political history of gemstones, the history of ignorance (agnotology), Nazi science and anthropology, the history of creationism and global climate denialism, and visual representation of phylogenetic trees. I'm also interested in the history of medical and scientific rhetoric, and the history of medical impotence (ie., social and cultural obstacles that keep us from solving large and easily soluble health problems). I'm interested in changing concepts of health and disease and how different social movements and political forces impact those concepts.
