On Monday 14 April 2025 Gretchen Heefner (Northeastern University) will be the eighth speaker for our 2024-2025 Seminar Series on Modern North American History, organized in cooperation with the Sciences Po Center for History (CHSP) in Paris.
Lecture title: From the Red Desert to the Red Planet: Engineering the American Empire
Lecturer: Gretchen Heefner
Date: Monday 14 April 2025 from 17:00 to 18:30 CEST
Location: Online
Please register here before Friday 11 April.
Gretchen Heefner is professor of history at Northeastern University, where she teaches and researches the history of the US in the world, with a focus on militarization, the environment, and the surprisingly intimate relations between national security regimes and the everyday. Her new book, Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments (out next month with the University of Chicago Press), explores how the US military has acquired and used information about extreme environments since 1940. Her work has appeared in Diplomatic History, Environmental History, and Endeavor. Her first book, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman and the Arming of the American Heartland (Harvard 2012), was a Choice Outstanding Academic title.
Deserts, the Arctic, outer space—these extreme environments are often seen as inhospitable places at the edges of our maps. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, spurred by the diverse and unfamiliar regions the US military had navigated during World War II, the United States defense establishment took a keen interest in these places, dispatching troops to the Aleutian Islands, North Africa, the South Pacific, and beyond. To preserve the country’s status as a superpower after the war, to pave runways and build bridges, engineers had to understand and then conquer dunes, permafrost, and even the surface of the moon. Gretchen will share stories and findings from her new book, Sand, Snow, and Stardust, and share information about connecting the dots between environmental history and the US military.
Click here for the official invitation.
