Amy M. Hay received her PhD from Michigan State University and is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas–Pan American. Her research interests examine the intersections of health, the environment, and public policy. Hay’s manuscript, Recipe for Disaster: Chemical Wastes, Community Activism, and Public Health at Love Canal, 1945–2000, won the 2006 Dixon Ryan Fox manuscript prize from the New York Historical Association; she is currently revising it for publication. Extending this research into a transnational context, her present project furthers her analysis on the interface between experts and laypeople in contesting the safety of chemicals and their effects on human beings and the environment. Focusing on the development, use, and protests against Agent Orange—the herbicide compound used to defoliate jungle growth in the Vietnam War—her research project explores ideas of citizenship, expertise, and environmental policy.
RCC Research Project: The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Herbicides and the American Public (pdf, 20 KB)
Selected Publications:
- “A Kind of Mylai . . . Against the Indochinese Countryside: American Scientists, Herbicides, and South Vietnamese Mangrove Forests.” In The Mekong Delta: Environmental Change and Agricultural Sustainability, edited by Mart Stewart and Peter Coclanis, 69-82. New York: Springer, 2011.
- “Dow Chemical vs ‘Coercive Utopians’: Constructing the Contested Ground of Science and Government Regulation in 1970s America.” Business and Economic History On-Line 9 (2011). http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHonline/2011/hay.pdf
- “A New Earthly Vision: Religious Community Activism in the Love Canal Chemical Disaster.” Environmental History 14, no. 3 ( 2009): 502-526.
- “Recipe for Disaster: Motherhood and Citizenship at Love Canal.” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 1 (2009): 111-134.