About

Leah Aronowsky

Lecturer, Department of History, Columbia University

Fellow, Society of Fellows, SOF/Heyman, Columbia University (2020–Present)

Leah Aronowsky is a historian of modern science and the environment, primarily in the twentieth-century United States. She received a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University in 2018. Her research explores the intersections of science, capitalism, and the environment in the history of planetary-scale environmental knowledge. She is currently writing a book on the history of the environmental sciences in the context of the emergent environmental regulatory state and the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. In 2019 this work was recognized with the Rachel Carson Prize for the best dissertation in environmental history from the American Society for Environmental History. Her writing, on topics ranging from the history of bioregenerative spaceflight technologies at NASA to the intellectual origins of climate change denialism, has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Environmental History, and Environmental Humanities.

Before joining the Society of Fellows, Leah was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois.