Philipp Nicolas Lehmann

I gained my PhD in History from Harvard in 2014. In my work, I combine themes and approaches from the history of science and technology with global environmental history, revealing the link between anxieties about environmental decline and designs to survey and control nature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am also preparing a book manuscript based on my dissertation research. Changing Climates: Deserts, Desiccation, and the Rise of Climate Engineering, 1870–1950 examines the impact of nineteenth-century discussions about climate change and desiccation on large engineering projects in desert regions. It demonstrates that the debate over the variability of global climatic conditions was a product of both internal academic and transnational political developments, and shows that the perceived threat of advancing desert conditions found a popular and technocratic expression in a long line of climate engineering designs from the Sahara to the Eurasian steppes.