Dr. Lisa Ruth Rand

Lisa Ruth Rand is a historian of technology, science, and the environment. Rand is assistant professor of history and a William H. Hurt Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, and a research associate at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Rand obtained a PhD in history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania. In research and teaching, Rand focuses on entanglements of technology, politics, and more-than-human natures that inflect disuse, disorder, and decay—and often also underpin ideas about extraterrestrial futures. Rand’s current book project examines the environmental history of near-Earth space with an emphasis on waste and wasting practices. Rand has also researched and published on maintenance and repair in space industry, the scientific politics of planetary analog habitats, and gendered embodied narratives of reproductive space futurity. Rand held a Guggenheim Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in 2022 and received the Emerging Scholars Policy Prize from the Perry World House in 2019.

RCC Research Project: Wasted Space: A History of Discard in Orbit

Selected Publications:

• “Rupture and Ruination in the Empyrean Empire.” In Cosmic Fragments: Dislocation and Discontent in the Global Space Age, edited by Asif A. Siddiqi. University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming.
• “Space Is the Place: Extraplanetary Disorder in Histories of Science.” BJHS Themes 9 (2024): 59–81. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2024.27.
• with Eleanor S. Armstrong. “To Queerly Go: Queer Studies, Space Histories, and Space Futures.” Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2024): 45–51.
• with Stephen J. Garber. “A Montreal Protocol for Space Junk?” Issues in Science and Technology 38, no. 3 (2022): 20–22.
• with Nina Wormbs. “Techno-Diplomacy of the Planetary Periphery, 1960s–1970s.” In History of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU): Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet, edited by Gabriele Balbi and Andreas Fickers. De Gruyter, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110669701-013.
• “Falling Cosmos: Nuclear Reentry and the Environmental History of Earth Orbit.” Environmental History 24, no. 1 (2019): 78–103. https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emy125.