Please join us for our next Rutgers Institute for Health Brown Bag Seminar with Dr. David Rosner, Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences & Professor of History at Columbia University. Dr. Rosner will be discussing his new book, Building the Worlds that Kill Us: Disease, Death and Inequality in American History (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Please join us in Conference Room 120 at IFH: 112 Paterson Street in New Brunswick. A Zoom link is below for those joining virtually.

About David Rosner: David Rosner, PhD, MPH, focuses on research at the intersection of public health and social history and the politics of occupational disease and industrial pollution. He has been actively involved in lawsuits on behalf of cities, states and communities around the nation who are trying to hold the lead, asbestos and chemical industry accountable for past acts that have resulted in tremendous damage to America’s children. Cases aimed at removing lead from children’s environments, removing PCBs from state waterways, and asbestos suits aimed at providing funds for remediation and compensation for victims of environmental and occupational disease have grown out of his academic work. His work on the history of industry understanding the harms done by their industrial toxins has been part of law suits on behalf of asbestos workers and silicosis victims as well.

About Building the Worlds that Kill Us: Across American history, the question of whose lives are long and healthy and whose lives are short and sick has always been shaped by the social and economic order. From the dispossession of Indigenous people and the horrors of slavery to infectious diseases spreading in overcrowded tenements and the vast environmental contamination caused by industrialization, and through climate change and pandemics in the twenty-first century, those in power have left others behind.

Through the lens of death and disease, Building the Worlds That Kill Us provides a new way of understanding the history of the United States from the colonial era to the present. David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz demonstrate that the changing rates and kinds of illnesses reflect social, political, and economic structures and inequalities of race, class, and gender. These deep inequities determine the disparate health experiences of rich and poor, Black and white, men and women, immigrant and native-born, boss and worker, Indigenous and settler. This book underscores that powerful people and institutions have always seen some lives as more valuable than others, and it emphasizes how those who have been most affected by the disparities in rates of disease and death have challenged and changed these systems. Ultimately, this history shows that unequal outcomes are a choice―and we can instead collectively make decisions that foster life and health.