RCC Alumnus Marc Landry Wins Two Prestigious Awards for Mountain Battery
17.07.2026
Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age (Stanford University Press) by Former Visiting Scholar Marc Landry won the 2026 George Perkins Marsh Prize for the best book in environmental history, sponsored by the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), as well as the Southern Historical Association’s prize for the best first book in European history—the Baker-Burton Award.
Mountain Battery explores landscape transformation in the Alps resulting from dam building, and its economic and military advantages throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Storing and producing electricity for use across Europe, Marc arcgues, the Alps became the continent’s “battery”—and water, in turn, became “white coal” with the economic potential of fossil fuel. (Text adapted from publisher’s website.)
An excerpt from the book can be read on the Environment & Society Portal.
Marc holds a PhD in environmental history from Georgetown University, and is associate professor of history, Marshall Plan Endowed Professor in Austrian Studies, and Director of the Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies, and Director of the Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies at the University of New Orleans.
The RCC community warmly congratulates Marc on receiving these two prestigious prizes!