Ruth Oldenziel is currently at the Rachel Carson Center with a stipend provided by the Society of Fellows. She was a Carson Fellow from August 2013 to January 2014, and August 2016 to October 2016, as well as a Visiting Scholar from August 2014 to January 2015.
Ruth Oldenziel has published widely in the areas of American, gender, and technology studies. She is a scholar of American-European history at the Eindhoven University of Technology, where she spearheaded its sustainability agenda by helping integrate research, education, and campus management into a living lab. Trained at Smith College at the University of Massachusetts and Yale University, where she received her PhD in American history, she is interested in how people re-appropriate material objects into their daily lives. Her book with Mikael Hård, Consumers, Users, Rebels, was published with Palgrave (October 2013). In recent years, she has focused on the history of cycling to understand how a technology that was once new turned into a symbol of backwardness and poverty in the 1940s, before being embraced as the ultimate tool for sustainability in the last decades.
RCC Research Project: Century of Cycling: Paths towards Sustainability (pdf, 64 KB)
Film Interview with Ruth Oldenziel
Selected Publications
- "Bicycle Taxes as Tools of Policy, 1890–2012." In Re/Cycling Histories: Paths to Sustainability, edited by Ruth Oldenziel and Helmut Trischler. London: Berghahn, forthcoming. (Co-authored with Adri A. de la Bruhèze).
- "Contested Spaces: Bicycle Lanes in Urban Europe, 1900–1995." Transfers 1, no. 2 (2011): 31–49. (Co-authored with Adri A. de la Bruhèze).
- "Introduction: Recycling Reconsidered." Contemporary European History 22, no. 3 (2013): 347–370. (Co-authored with Heiker Weber).
- "The Glass Recycling Container in the Netherlands: Symbol in Times of Shortages and Abundance, 1939–1978." Journal of Contemporary European History 22, no. 3 (2013): 453–476. (Co-authored with Milena Veenis).
- Re/Cycling Histories: Paths towards Sustainability, edited by Ruth Oldenziel and Helmut Trischler. The Environment in History: International Perspectives. London: Berghahn, forthcoming.