Sara B. Pritchard

Professor Sara Pritchard is an historian of technology and an environmental historian specializing in twentieth-century France and the French empire, and a 2015 Public Voices Fellow at the Op-Ed Project.

Sara's first book, _Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), examines the history of the transformation of France's Rhône River since World War II. She shows not only how technological development and environmental management were central to state building and shifting political identities in France, but also how historical actors reworked the boundaries of nature and technology, both materially and discursively. The book's Introduction outlines a theoretical framework for envirotechnical analysis, which scrutinizes the relationship between nature and technology, historically and analytically. Sara has also examined the circulation of hydraulic experts, knowledge, artifacts, and practices between France and French North Africa within the context of France's global empire and transnational communities of water specialists. She is developing a new book project on the history and politics of light pollution, tentatively entitled _From Blue to Black Marble: Knowing Light Pollution in the Anthropocene_.