Jay Turner

William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Environmental Studies

Contact
Phone:
+1 (781) 283-2820
Email:
jturner@wellesley.edu
Department
Environmental Studies
Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing

Links

Researcher on the recent history of U.S. environmental politics and policy, including climate change, the clean energy transition, and public lands management.

James (Jay) Morton Turner is a historian working on topics including climate change, the clean energy transition, and environmental politics. His public-facing work has appeared in venues including Science, The New York Times, Natural History, Lapham's Quarterly, Literary Hub, and The Conversation. He is currently vice president of the American Society for Environmental History.

Book cover - Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future

Turner's most recent book, Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future, unpacks the history of batteries to explore why solving the battery problem is crucial to a clean energy transition. In 2023, Charged won the Glasscock Book Award from Texas A&M University and was a finalist for the Cundill History Prize administered by McGill University.


TBGM-24-Month-Update
Turner and students at Wellesley College track and analyze trends in investments in clean energy manufacturing in the United States. This work includes a publicly accessible dashboard and dataset tracking the geography, jobs, and environmental justice implications of projects in the wind, solar, battery, and electric vehicle supply chains. These resources are available at The Big Green Machine. This tracking has been cited in publications including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Chemical & Engineering News, MIT Technology Review, and Nature and served as the basis of Turner's presentations to groups including the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Center for Strategic & International Studies, and the Wilson Center.

Turner's previous books include The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (2018), co-authored with Andrew C. Isenberg, and The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (2010). These books explore the landscape of U.S. environmental politics, considering changes in environmental advocacy, conservative opposition, and the role of science in policy making. In 2013, The Promise of Wilderness won the Weyerhaeuser Book Award from the Forest History Society.

Turner teaches courses on topics including climate change, energy policy, environmental politics, and environmental history. Turner received a B.S. from Washington and Lee University in 1995, an A.M. in American Civilization from Brown University in 1996, a Ph.D. in History (History of Science) from Princeton University in 2004, and a certificate in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.


Education

  • B.S., Washington and Lee University
  • M.A., Brown University
  • Ph.D., Princeton University

Current and upcoming courses

Environment and Society: Addressing Climate Change

ES102

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to Environmental Studies, with a focus on climate change. Major concepts that will be examined include: the state of scientific research, the role of science, politics, and economics in environmental decision-making, and the importance of history, ethics, and justice in approaching climate change. The central aim of the course is to help students develop the interdisciplinary research skills necessary to pose questions, investigate problems, and develop strategies that will help us address our relationship to the environment.

  • The Climate Crisis and the Liberal Arts

    ES125H

    The humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences are indispensable to understanding the climate crisis. Drawing on perspectives from across the liberal arts, the course instructors will plumb the depths of the climate crisis and imagine the possible ways of responding to it. What can the role of climate in human history reveal about our uncertain future? How do social constructions, including race and gender, shape our understanding of this problem? How have diverse cultures of the world related to nature and climate and how can our own relationships to nature and climate inform our responses? Can the arts help us to reconceive the crisis? How can the sciences help us assess and adapt to our future climate? Can we leverage psychological processes to change individual attitudes toward the environment? By examining such questions, we aim for deeper knowledge, both of the climate crisis and of the power of liberal arts education. (ES 125H and PEAC 125H are cross-listed courses.)

  • U.S. Environmental Politics

    ES381

    This course examines the politics of environmental issues in the United States. The course has two primary goals: First, to introduce students to the institutions, stakeholders, and political processes important to debates over environmental policy at the federal level. Second, to develop and practice skills of analyzing and making decisions relevant to environmental politics and policy. Drawing on the literature of environmental politics and policy, this course will consider how environmental issues are framed in political discourse, various approaches to environmental advocacy and reform, and the contested role of science in environmental politics. The course will be organized around environmental case studies, including endangered species conservation, public lands management, air and water pollution, and toxics regulation. (ES 381 and POL1 381 are cross-listed courses.)