On March 11, SOF Fellow Leah Aronowsky will give a talk entitled The Climate Crisis and the History of Science at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The talk is an introduction to the history of science—its methods, questions, and analytic sensibilities—as it relates to the climate crisis and our scientific knowledge about it. How can the history of climate change science help us better understand climate politics today? How can it help us think differently about pressing social issues like climate justice, decarbonization, and adaptation? What role can the history of science play in training the next generation of climate policymakers?

Leah Aronowsky is a historian working at the intersection of the history of science and environmental history. Leah’s current book project explores the intersections of science, capitalism, and the environment in the history of planetary-scale environmental knowledge, primarily in the twentieth-century United States. In 2019, research for this project received the Rachel Carson Prize for the best dissertation in environmental history from the American Society for Environmental Policy. Leah’s academic writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Environmental History, and Environmental Humanities, among other outlets. Leah also writes about contemporary climate politics in places like The New York Review of Books. Prior to joining Columbia, Dr. Aronowsky received a PhD from Harvard and was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in environmental humanities at the University of Illinois.