ANNA LEHR MUESER

I am an historian of the environment and technology 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 enviro-technical systems. Currently, I am a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

My current project is about the consequences of infrastructure, over time. Titled “Land After Technology: Collective Memory and the New York City Water Supply”, this 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.

Left: Farm in Bovina, New York. 2022.