Dr. Jessica van Horssen is a historian who focuses on environmental health and contamination in her work. Her first monograph, A Town Called Asbestos: Environmental Health, Contamination, and Resilience in a Resource Community (UBC Press, 2016) explores the history of the community once known as Asbestos, Quebec, which housed the largest opencast chrysotile asbestos mine in the world for much of the 20th century. She is now a co-investigator on the Mining Danger: Industrial Disease, Accidents, and Pollution in Canada's Mines and Mining Communities, 1870-1990, funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant. While her work on asbestos is ongoing, van Horssen also explores the history of Augmented Natures, and the way plastics and other synthetic materials came to simulate parts of the natural world.
