Joshua Lappen awarded Allan Nevins Prize

The RAI congratulates Joshua Lappen on being awarded the prestigious Allan Nevins Prize for his Oxford doctoral dissertation, ‘Cultures of Power: Electrification, Politics and Visibility in Greater Los Angeles.’

Joshua Lappen is a RAI Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. He was a postgraduate member of the RAI during his doctoral studies, and he successfully defended his DPhil thesis in the spring of 2024.

His doctoral thesis, ‘Cultures of Power’, charted the electrification of greater Los Angeles between 1882 and 1956. Electricity’s prominence in society long outlasted its novelty in everyday life in greater Los Angeles. For decades after it became ubiquitous, electricity continued to accrete new cultural and political connotations, growing ever more popular as a medium of social expression. This regime of electric visibility structured Angelenos’ social lives, aesthetic visions, and political ideologies, encouraging individuals and institutions alike to pursue their disparate goals by directing, controlling, consuming, and symbolically displaying electricity. Electric visibility, rather than mere novelty, determined electricity’s social prominence in greater Los Angeles. Likewise, the decline of that regime shrank electricity’s range of meanings, and the rise of a countervailing regime of electric invisibility gradually encouraged Angelenos to obscure electricity’s position in culture and the urban landscape. That transit from visibility to invisibility defined the social process of electrification.

Echoing the assessments of Josh’s DPhil examiner, RAI Senior Fellow, Stephen Tuffnell, the Nevins Prize committee in their statement praised the ‘indefatigable research, dynamic analysis, and narrative flair’ that underpinned ‘Cultures of Power.’

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The Society of American Historians awards the Allan Nevins Prize annually to the best-written doctoral dissertation on a significant subject in American history. The winning work is published by one of the distinguished publishing houses that support the prize. The award is named in honour of the Society’s founder, Allan Nevins (Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History, 1940-1941 and 1964-1965).