RESEARCH INTERESTS

19th-and 20th-century United States and Pacific World: Hawai‘i; American West; Australia and New Zealand; infectious diseases, public health, medicine, technology, and the environment; race, indigeneity, and migration; empire, urbanization, global mobility, and commerce; visual and material culture

BIOGRAPHY

Christopher “Topher” Kindell is a historian of public health, medicine, technology, and the environment from the eighteenth century to the present. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago (2019) and an M.Sc. in History from the University of Edinburgh (2011). Before joining the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at Chicago, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Medicine at the University of Minnesota (2021-22) and a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Chicago (2019-2021). Broadly speaking, his research examines how public health and medical professionals in urban environments responded to the global spread of infectious diseases. His current book manuscript, Pasteurizing the Pacific: Public Health, Empire, and the Making of the Urban Pacific World, explores how health officials, Native Hawaiians, and East Asian immigrants transformed Honolulu from a passive harbor into a disease-screening checkpoint for Hawai‘i, the Pacific, and America’s overseas empire. More recently, he has been investigating how global cities actively collaborated with local residents when designing and implementing COVID-19-related health policies. He teaches courses on the history of public health, medicine, and technology; climate change and the environment; race, indigeneity, and migration; and American imperialism in the Pacific World.

PUBLICATIONS

“Brothel of the Pacific: Syphilis and the Urban Regulation of Laikini Wāhine in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, 1855-1875,” The Journal of Pacific History 55, no. 1 (2020): 18-36.

Review: Kate Fullagar and Michael McDonnell, eds., Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Agricultural History 95, no. 1 (2021): 187-189.

Review: Tiffany Lani Ing, Reclaiming Kalākaua: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on a Hawaiian Sovereign (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019), The Journal of Pacific History 56, no. 1 (2021): 87-88.

Co-Authored with Laura Valdés Cano, “Participatory Governance in Local Care Programs: Lessons from Bogotá and Chicago,” Metropolis and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (2022).