Josh Lappen

Pulte Affiliated Postdoc

Josh Lappen is a historian and engineer who studies how energy networks shape and are shaped by local landscapes and political institutions. His historical work spans the American West, examining how emergent energy systems have provided new mechanisms for contesting governance, ideology, identity, and public memory. At Notre Dame, he works with Dr. Emily Grubert on the political economy of contemporary fossil energy systems and strategies for a just energy transition.

His first book project, Cultures of Power, reorients the history of electric-system development from established trans-Atlantic industrial and financial centers to the remote energy desert of late nineteenth-century Los Angeles. In the process, it rewrites the story of metropolitan Southern California, revealing the pivotal role that electric systems have played in shaping the region’s growth, boundaries, and cultures. By investigating the entanglement of electric infrastructures with local landscapes and political institutions, Cultures of Power offers a new understanding of how technologies become, remain, and cease to be prominent in daily life. In a moment of mounting scholarly and popular interest in the politics of energy, these findings chart a new path towards public engagement with energy systems, suggesting a range of new tactics for rapid, just, and lasting decarbonization.

Josh regularly writes on the political economy of decarbonization and the role of energy infrastructure in shaping popular culture and public memory in outlets including Heatmap, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. He is currently serving as an author of the Mitigation chapter of the Sixth National Climate Assessment.

Josh received his doctorate in History from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall and a Clarendon Scholar. He also holds a BA in Classics and an MS in Atmosphere/Energy Engineering from Stanford University, and an MPhil in History from Oxford. His research has been supported by a Mellon Fellowship from the Huntington Library, a James Ingebretsen Memorial Fellowship from the University of Oregon, and a series of other grants and awards.