Jay Turner, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Environmental Studies at Wellesley College, is one of 11 scholars in the Boston area to be awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship, joining the Guggenheim Foundation’s 100th class of fellows.
Turner trained as a historian, and his research is rooted in environmental history. He studies environmental politics in the United States and clean energy transitions, and as a Guggenheim fellow he will continue his previous research with a book project on the future of clean energy that will examine how “rethinking the history of energy can help us see the possibilities for a clean energy transition,” he says. Motivating Turner’s project is his interest in exploring how we might solve sustainability and energy justice challenges differently in a world of energy abundance.
In a departure from his previous work, Turner will expand his research beyond the United States to look at other nations’ approaches to energy transitions. He says he wants to find out what the U.S. could learn from them at a time when our methods of facing climate change are largely failing.
Turner credits the College with sustaining an academic environment that lets professors be flexible and explore new subjects of interest. “One of the great things about being at Wellesley is the freedom to take risks with our research and go in new directions,” he says. He adds that as a member of an interdisciplinary department, he has the opportunity to co-teach with faculty from a variety of fields and work with students who approach environmental studies from different backgrounds: “It’s been key to shaping my interest in connecting [environmental] history with present-day challenges.”
When Turner began teaching at Wellesley around 20 years ago, he was researching the discussion over public lands in the U.S. and how such debates had shaped environmental politics since the 1960s. He tackled those questions in his first book, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964, published in 2012.
Following this focus on American environmental politics, in 2018 Turner wrote The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump, with co-author Andrew C. Isenberg, about the Republican Party’s history of environmental activism and how American conservatives transitioned to an anti-environmentalist rhetoric. Over the last several years his focus has shifted to clean energy and how the U.S. can work toward a renewable energy transition.
Turner’s 2022 book, Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future, addresses the “battery problem”—batteries have an impact on the environment through such processes as mining and disposal, but at the same time they are crucial to a clean energy transition. Using Charged as a platform, Turner has worked with Wellesley students to track investments in clean energy manufacturing in North America. Their work is available at The Big Green Machine. He will build on that tracking work and his research in Charged for his Guggenheim project.
Turner recognizes that this is a “hard moment” for students and scholars in environmental studies due to political divisions and funding issues: “It’s a moment where there’s a lot of work to be done in the near term, but we also need to take the long-term view.” He says he is grateful that the Guggenheim fellowship and the support of the College have allowed him to stay engaged in these present-day challenges even as he studies the long term, analyzing historical patterns and their connections to energy transitions.