Lisa Ruth Rand
Research Assistant Professor of History
Profile
Lisa Ruth Rand is a historian of technology, science, and the environment who tends to gravitate toward extreme natures and broken things. Rand is currently writing a first book that explores the environmental history of outer space by focusing on the high technology waste byproducts popularly known as space junk. In this research, entanglements of human and non-human natural forces drive disuse, disorder, and decay in orbit, playing a significant part in shaping the uneven global contours of the Space Age. Additional interests include public history, critical discard studies, and extraterrestrial futurism, from the technopolitics of planetary analog habitats to the colonizing role of Republican Motherhood in frontier narratives.
Before coming to Caltech, Rand held positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and the Science History Institute. In 2019 she received the Emerging Scholars Global Policy Prize from the Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania and in 2022 held a Guggenheim Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
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Selected Publications
Space Junk: A History of Waste in Orbit. (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
"Rupture and Ruination in the Empyrean Empire." Cosmic Fragments: Dislocation and Discontent in the Global Space Age, ed. Asif Siddiqi (University of Pittsburgh Press, June 2025).
"From Sputnik to Starlink: Historical Perspectives on Astronomy and Satellite Communications." Under One Sky: The IAU Centenary Symposium Proceedings IAU Symposium No. 385 (March 2025).
"Space Is the Place: Extraplanetary Disorder in Histories of Science." British Journal for the History of Science Themes 9 (December 2024).
"To Queerly Go: Queer Studies, Space Histories, and Space Futures" with Eleanor S. Armstrong. Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly, Volume 31, Issue 1, 2024.
"A Montreal Protocol for Space Junk?" with Stephen J. Garber. Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 2022.
"Weapons tests in space could shut down ATMs and ground your next flight." The Washington Post, November 19 2021.
"Global Roots of a Gilded Space Age." The New Space Age: Beyond Global Order, Perry World House, September 2021.
"Techno-Diplomacy of the Planetary Periphery, 1960s-1970s" with Nina C. Wormbs. History of the International Telecommunication Union: Transnational Techno-Diplomacy from the Telegraph to the Internet, ed. Andreas Fickers and Gabriele Balbi (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020).
"Falling Cosmos: Nuclear Reentry and the Environmental History of Earth Orbit." Environmental History, Volume 24, Issue 1, January 2019.
For a complete list of publications, see Google Scholar.