World Wounds: The Damming of the Nile River and the Transformation of Medicine

The damming of the Nile River transformed agriculture and human health in twentieth-century Egypt. While dams enabled year-round irrigation and provided hydroelectricity, the prevalence of parasitic disease also skyrocketed. Professor Derr explores the effects of damming the Nile on the health of Egyptians and the impact of large-scale environmental transformation on the knowledge and practice that made medicine during the twentieth century.

April 7, 2026
Reception 5:30 p.m.
Lecture 6 p.m.
Music Recital Hall and Virtual
Free and open to the public

Jennifer Derr is an Associate Professor in the history department at UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt, won the Middle East Political Economy Book Prize. In 2019, the National Science Foundation awarded Derr a CAREER grant to support her research on the “History of Science at the Interface of Biomedical and Environmental Concerns.” In 2024-2025, she was a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Nauenberg History of Science Lecture
The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture was established in honor of Michael Nauenberg, a founding faculty member in the Physics Department at UCSC who came to the campus in 1966. During his distinguished academic career, he contributed to a remarkably broad range of fields, including particle physics, condensed matter physics, astrophysics, chaos theory, fluid dynamics, and the history of physics in the 17th-18th centuries.

Amongst Professor Nauenberg’s passions, he deeply believed in the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship connecting the sciences with the humanities. Following his retirement in 1994, he pursued his long-standing interests in the history of science, writing books and articles about Joseph Banks, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Newton. The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture Series features leading historians of science and highlights the significance of their work across disciplines for faculty, students, and community members.

The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture is presented by the UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Association and co-sponsored by the Science & Justice Research Center, The Humanities Institute, the Humanities Division, the Environmental Studies Department, the History Department, and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA).