Conevery Bolton Valencius is a professor of history and environmental studies at Boston College. She earned a BA in History from Stanford University and in 1998, a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. She has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Massachusetts Boston, and was an independent scholar when her children were young. She joined the faculty of Boston College in 2016. Professor Valencius has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study, and has received funding from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. Her first book, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land, won the George Perkins Marsh Award for best book from the American Society for Environmental History in 2002. She published The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes with the University of Chicago Press in 2013. She has written about travel and health in the American West, the 19th-century science of medical geography, and the medical vision of Russian writer Anton Chekhov. Professor Valencius is currently working with science journalist Anna Kuchment to write a new book, a scientific detective story about earthquakes and modern energy extraction. They are chronicling how researchers in the past dozen years tried to figure out how contemporary oil and gas production – especially fracking – is involved with the alarming rise of earthquakes in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and elsewhere in the central United States.

康纳威瑞·波尔顿·瓦伦修斯任教于波士顿学院，教授历史与环境研究。她于斯坦福大学取得学士学位，于1998年在哈佛大学取得科学史博士学位。她曾在圣路易斯华盛顿大学与马萨诸塞大学波士顿分校执教，并曾在她的孩子们年幼时以独立学者身份工作。她于2016年来到波士顿学院。瓦伦修斯教授曾于拉德克利夫高级研究院工作，获得过美国国家人文科学基金的支持。她撰写的首部专著，《国家的健康：美国开拓者对自身及土地的理解》于2002年出版，并获得美国环境史学会的乔治·珀金斯·马什最佳环境史图书奖。2013年，芝加哥大学出版社出版了她的第二部著作，《新马德里地震的失落历史》。她亦曾以美国西部的旅行与健康，19世纪医疗地理学作为一门科学的发展，以及医疗视角下的俄罗斯作家安东·契诃夫等主题进行写作。目前，瓦伦修斯教授正与科学记者安娜·库切门特合作，写作一部关于地震与现代能量提取的科学侦探故事。她们正在追溯过去数十年中研究者们尝试辨明当代石油与天然气生产——特别是以水力压裂技术进行的生产——与包括俄克拉何马、得克萨斯、阿肯色在内的美国各地频发地震之关联的努力。  

演讲内容简介

The COVID-19 pandemic has focused global attention on contamination, contagion, the deadly potential of everyday places, and the harm that can waft towards us on air currents. Across nations, people have transformed daily life and work to avoid infection that can travel on breezes or be conveyed through innocuous, ordinary conversation. These fears feel new and strange to many of us. But fears of disease, especially disease conveyed through everyday environments, marked many eras of the history of medicine. In this lecture, Professor Valencius will share some of her research into the ways that people in the early nineteenth-century United States understood their health to depend upon their surrounding environments. She will introduce the miasmatic theory of disease, in which harmful emanations called miasmas would transmit ill influences to human bodies. She will discuss how people in the nineteenth century used mineral waters and hot springs to revive their health. She will show how ideas of environmental medicine reinforced the growing racism in a country economically committed to race-based slavery. Her work describes places and times that may seem very far away – the early 1800s, on the edges of a growing United States, along the lower Mississippi River. Yet this history suggests surprising connections with our fears for our health and our environments today, whether in the United States, where pollution is increasing and COVID is still spreading widely, or in China, where smog in major cities makes the qualities of air a constant concern, just as it was for settlers in the U.S. two centuries ago.

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