Melanie Kiechle is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech. As a cultural historian of health and environment, she specializes in the nineteenth-century United States. Her first 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. Her current research examines how individuals made decisions about health and illness before germ theory; how the belief that people have different sensitivities influenced public health policies; and the role of creek burial in urban development. She writes widely on the history of public health and is a recognized expert on miasma theory.