Brown Seminar: Urban Space, Water, and Health in Colonial Charleston
In this program, Molly Nebiolo will explore how the tidal creeks surrounding the city of Charleston and the other bodies of water noted (or not noted) on early colonial maps can help us ask big questions from these documents. This talk will focus on early American experiences of urban health which can be extracted from following these maps that depict or ignore the seasonality and variability of Charleston’s waterways.
Dr. Molly Nebiolo is an assistant professor of history at Butler University and holds a PhD in world history from Northeastern University. Her monograph, Constructing Health: Concepts of Well-Being in an Urbanizing Atlantic World is under contract with UVA Press. Her expertise is in early Atlantic world history, the history of science and medicine, urban history, and the digital humanities. Her scholarship has been supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Philosophical Society, the Clements Library, among many others. For more information, please see her professional website: www.mollynebiolo.com.
This talk is part of the Richard H. Brown Seminar on the Historical Geography of the American Revolutionary Era and was recorded September 16, 2025.