ANNA LEHR MUESER

I am an historian of  science, technology, and the environment in the twentieth century. Working across science and technology studies and memory studies, my work is driven by curiosity about how people have made sense of their relationships to lost places, concepts of the past, and living with and within large infrastructural and envirotechnical systems. I completed my PhD in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2025.

My first book project is about the consequences of infrastructure, over time. This book project examines the intersections of collective memory, placemaking practices, and watershed development and management in the rural region which supplies nearly all of New York City’s drinking water. Through the history of New York City’s development and regulation of an expanding watershed in the Catskill Mountains, I interrogate how people whose lives and environments have been directly shaped by infrastructural systems relate to concepts of heritage and belonging, relationships between individuals, small communities, and the state, and the connections between rural and urban spaces.