Christy Spackman is an assistant professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. She studies the environmental and social impact of scientific and technological efforts to manipulate sensory experiences of smelling and tasting. The recipient of fellowships at New York University and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies, she’s writing “Making Nothing: the twentieth-century transformation of water.”