Melanie Kiechle
Department of History
417 Major Williams Hall, 220 Stanger St.
Blacksburg, VA 24061
540-231-7523 | mkiechle@vt.edu
Melanie Kiechle is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech. She is interested in environmental and bodily knowledge in periods of change. Her book, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Urban America, 1840-1900, explores how Americans used their sense of smell to understand and react to industrial growth and urban concentration between the rise of the public health movement and the Progressive Era.
- 19th Century United States
- Environmental History
- Urban History
- Smells and Smelling
- Ph.D., Rutgers University
- B.A., Colgate University
- Member, Organization of American Historians
- Member, American Association for the History of Medicine
- Member, American Historical Association
- Member, American Society for Environmental History
- 2014-15 American Antiquarian Society-National Endowment for the Humanities Awards Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, March 2014
- 2014 Visible Scholarship Initiative Libraries Mini-Grant, Virginia Tech College for Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, December 2013
- 2014 Niles Research Grant, Virginia Tech College for Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, October 2013
Book
Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017.
Journal Articles
“Navigating by Nose: Fresh Air, Stench Nuisance and the Urban Environment, 1840- 1880,” Journal of Urban History, forthcoming.
“The Smell Detectives,” Chemical Heritage 29:2 (Summer 2011): 32-36.
Featured Books
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Select Media Mentions
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Article ItemThe five senses , article
With Good Reason, 11/4/22
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Article ItemRevisiting a 19th century medical idea could help address COVID-19 , article
Washington Post, 4/21/2021
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Article ItemFighting Disease with Smell: “Disinfection” during the Civil War , article
National Museum of Civil War Medicine, 10/01/2019
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General ItemJon Batiste, Gail Simmons, and Strange Smells
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know, 10/31/2017
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General ItemWhat the Nose Knows
The American Scholar, 07/28/2017
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General ItemPodcast: Q&A with Melanie Kiechle, author of Smell Detectives
Science Magazine, 07/26/2017
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