Josh Lappen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs, where he conducts interdisciplinary research on the relationships between energy systems, political institutions, and local landscapes. His research interests include climate and energy policy, environmental history, the history of science and technology, and American political development.
His first book project, Cultures of Power, reorients the history of electric-system development from established trans-Atlantic industrial and financial centers to the remote energy desert of late nineteenth-century Los Angeles. In the process, it rewrites the story of metropolitan Southern California, revealing the pivotal role that electric systems have played in shaping the region’s growth, boundaries, and cultures. By investigating the entanglement of electric infrastructures with local landscapes and political institutions, Cultures of Power offers a new understanding of how technologies become, remain, and cease to be prominent in daily life. In a moment of mounting scholarly and popular interest in the politics of energy, these findings chart a new path towards public engagement with energy systems, suggesting a range of new tactics for rapid, just, and lasting decarbonization.
Josh regularly writes on the political economy of decarbonization and the role of energy infrastructure in shaping popular culture and public memory in outlets including Heatmap, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. He is currently serving as an author of the Mitigation chapter of the Sixth National Climate Assessment.
Josh completed his doctorate at the RAI in Trinity Term 2024. He also holds a BA in Classics and an MS in Atmosphere/Energy Engineering from Stanford University, and an MPhil in History from Oxford. His research has been supported by Marshall and Clarendon Scholarships, a Mellon Fellowship from the Huntington Library, and a series of other grants and awards.
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