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. I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University.

My first book project examines citizen relationships with the environmental regulatory state in the twentieth century through the example of New York City’s drinking water. This project examines the intersections of collective memory, placemaking practices, and watershed development and management in the rural region which supplies nearly all of the city’s drinking water. 

I show how decisions about environmental regulation, land use, and government services have been shot through with historical memories about the meaning and lost futures of the rural watershed. I argue that antiregulatory politics counterintuitively led to a dramatic expansion of state power at the end of the twentieth century.