Lisa Ruth Rand has been appointed Assistant Professor of History at Caltech. Ruth also signed a contract with Harvard University Press for her book, Space Junk: A History of Waste in Orbit, and has received a six-month Guggenheim fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum.
Lisa Ruth Rand
Ph.D. CandidateDepartment of History and Sociology of ScienceUniversity of Pennsylvania
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Dissertation Fellow
Orbital Decay: Space Junk and the Environmental History of Earth’s Borderlands, 1957-1985
What is space junk, and who or what defines pollution in an environment seemingly devoid of the trappings of nature as we know it? This dissertation constitutes one of the first scholarly forays into the environmental history of outer space. Convergent changes in the orbital landscape and in the political landscape below during the Cold War, concurrent with the rise of mainstream environmentalism, reveal the roots of an international understanding of the borderlands between Earth and outer space as a threatened natural environment. A discourse of environmental risk emerged from the first moments of human access to outer space, far earlier than acknowledged by many current space policy experts forecasting the imminent collapse and closure of the final frontier. In examining the interpretive flexibility of space artifacts as they move through and return from the planetary borderlands, “Orbital Decay” explores this extreme environment as a site of contested scientific moral authority, shifting values of consumption and resource use, and Space Age spatial politics.
Updates
Lisa Ruth Rand
Lisa Ruth Rand
Ruth has begun a two-year Haas Fellowship at the Science History Institute.
Lisa Ruth Rand
Ruth was awarded the Perry World House's Inaugural Emerging Scholars Global Policy Prize for original essays intended for a policy audience that draw on original academic research. She also published an article titled "Falling Cosmos: Nuclear Reentry and the Environmental History of Earth Orbit" in Environmental History. In fall 2019 she will begin a Haas Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Science History Institute.
Lisa Ruth Rand
This year Ruth held the 2015-16 NASA Fellowship in the History of Space Technology. In fall 2015, she presented a paper titled "Up to Earth: Falling Space Junk and the Spatial Expansion of Environmental Politics during the Long 1970s" at the Society for the History of Technology annual meeting, and was a featured guest on the podcast at Environmental History Resources. In spring 2016 she attended, presented a paper, and organized a panel at the American Society for Environmental History annual meeting. Her recent publications include (with Dave Baiocchi) Good Seeing: Best Practices for Sustainable Operations at the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Site (RAND Corporation, 2016) and a review of Turchetti and Roberts, eds., The Surveillance Imperative: Geosciences during the Cold War and Beyond, published in Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 23 no. 1 (2016). She has publications forthcoming in several forums, including Isis, the Smithsonian Institution, and Physics World. In the spring semester Ruth was awarded a 2016-2018 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.