Ena H. Thompson Lectures

2026 Ena H. Thompson Distinguished Lecture

Ruth Rogaski

Ruth Rogaski is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University specializing in the history of science, medicine, and the environment in China. She is the author of Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2004), which traces how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hygienic Modernity was awarded the Fairbank Prize in East Asian history, the Levenson Prize in Chinese studies, the Welch Medal in the history of medicine, and was co-recipient of the Berkshire Prize. She is also the author of Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which explores how diverse observers created knowledge about northeast Asia’s multiple environments from the seventeenth century to the present. Knowing Manchuria was awarded the George Perkins Marsh Prize in environmental history by the American Society for Environmental History and the Suzanne J. Levinson Prize in the history of the life sciences and natural history by the History of Science Society. Grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes for Health have funded her research and writing.

She is currently writing a book on the practice of traditional Chinese medicine in the American South, focusing on her home city of Nashville, Tennessee.

There will be two on-campus lectures, Tuesday March 10 and Thursday March 12.

About the Lectureship

Endowed in 1980 through the generosity of Ena H. Thompson, these annual lectures encourage a broader understanding and appreciation of history. Generally held in the spring semester, the lectureship brings a distinguished historian to the Pomona College campus for a week of intensive interaction with students, faculty, and alumni. The visiting lecturers are elected both on the basis of their past contributions to the discipline and of the importance of their current research in advancing the field. Typically, they offer two public lectures on campus during the week of their residency and another lecture for alumni at a dinner event in the greater Los Angeles area.