Adelaide Mandeville

Adelaide Mandeville is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard. Her dissertation, “Changes in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of Weather Control in the Twentieth-century United States,” examines the American preoccupation with managing, modifying, and mastering the weather from the 1940s to the 1970s, which, she argues, constituted both the apotheosis and failure of modern, secular ideas about controlling nature. Each chapter traces the ethical, epistemological, and political debates that surrounded cloud seeding (a technology in which humans put chemicals into clouds, in hopes of controlling the weather), as it was undertaken and then abandoned by a range of actors. Grounded in archival research, her interdisciplinary methodology combines historical analysis with theoretical frameworks—from cultural studies, political theory, STS, and anthropology—regarding ideas of nature, techno-politics, secularism, and modernity. Adelaide’s work has been supported by the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, NASA, the History of Science Society, the LBJ Library, the Huntington Library, the American Institute of Physics, and the Charles Warren Center for American History. In addition to her research and writing, she has helped teach classes on social democracy, environmental history, and American history. Most recently, she served as the pedagogy writer and editor for Jill Lepore’s textbook, These Truths: A History of the United States (Norton 2023). Adelaide holds a BA in Religious Studies from Brown University, where she graduated with honors in 2012.