Jessica Varner, PhD, explores the intersections between chemical engineering, building materials, product regulation, environmental advocacy, and landscape histories. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture (HTC) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021. 

Her current book project, Chemical Desires, uncovers the ties between corporate chemical firms and construction materials in the United States and Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. The research reveals how companies employed novel research strategies, exhibitions, advertising campaigns, and sponsorship to conscript designers and engineers as enthusiastic exponents of novel synthetic compounds derived from coal, oil, and gas. In doing so, her work exposes how chemical corporations promoted desires for “new” engineered qualities that aligned with growing modernist expectations while simultaneously crafting ways of unknowingly harm—creating chemical modernisms intractable from modern design. This work received generous support from the Fulbright Foundation, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), National Science Foundation, Science History Institute, MIT Martin Society of Fellows, USC Society of Fellows, Getty Research Institute, ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies), and the Graham Foundation (Carter Manny Dissertation Award and Individual Research Award).

She is also a trained architect and has worked collectively with two non-profit organizations, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) (researcher and steering committee member since 2019) and Coming Clean (toxics-free coalition member since 2022), to turn research into action. Together, she works to center justice in toxics policy to build alternatives and seek repair for the seemingly insoluble environmental problems today.

Current Research

Current projects include a book on chemical modernity and toxicity in 20th-century design materials, an essay on mold Stachybotrys chartarum (or black mold), a review of the U.S. Pavilion (Venice Biennale) and the place of plastics, an NSF research project on community-led environmental history and cumulative exposures, a co-edited volume on consent/refusal in environmental-right-to-know futures, and new book research about neurotoxins and material culture in the Global South and U.S. South that considers how people’s self-determination pushed beyond harm and against distanced violence and neurotoxic effects.

Research Consultant (email for inquiries here)