Spring Greeney

Spring Greeney is an environmental historian broadly interested in the politics of domestic work in the 20th-century United States. During her stay at the Institute she was a doctoral candidate in the history department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her dissertation focused on the changing ecological assemblages that commercial chemists, domestic workers, and advertisers used to reinvent what consumers expected cleanliness to look, feel, and smell like—as well as who they imagined should do the work of the wash. From rancidity-prone soap to petrochemical detergents, from steam laundry boilers to cold-cycle washing machines, the project revealed how attempts to standardize nonhuman nature also shaped the visibility, value, and meaning of domestic work across the past 150 years of primarily U.S. history without ever fully refuting its gendering as feminized work.