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UID:calendar.2293.events_uoft_date.0@www.humanities.utoronto.ca
CREATED:20230315T151353Z
DESCRIPTION:\nWhen and Where: \nTuesday, March 28, 2023 4:00 pm to 6:00 p
 m \n Seminar Room 208, North House \n Munk School \n 1 Devonshire Place 
 \n\nSpeakers \nGretchen Heefner \n\nDescription: \nThis event is taking pl
 ace at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar Room 208, North Hou
 se, Toronto, Ontario.From the Red Desert to the Red Planet: Military eng
 ineers, granular materials, and how we know what we know about extreme e
 nvironments   In the 1940s and 1950s U.S. military engineers fanned out ac
 ross the world to construct military installations in some of the world’s 
 most extreme and inhospitable environments. This talk charts the work of t
 he engineers as they moved from sand dunes in the Sahara, to the ice on t
 op of Greenland, and then to plans for building a base on the Moon. All t
 he while, the engineers were acutely aware of the materials in question: 
 the sand, the snow, the stardust. By exploring such materials -- at fiel
 d stations around the world and in laboratories closer to home – military 
 engineers created new ways of understanding such environments. What they l
 earned, over time, is that places such as the desert and Arctic are not 
 discrete landscapes; they are tied to our everyday in surprising and inti
 mate ways.   This talk is drawn from Heefner’s current manuscript, Sand,
  Snow, and Stardust, the history of how we know what we know about extre
 me environments. Places such as the desert, the Arctic, and outer space 
 that exist out there somewhere, on the edges of our  These are places tha
 t have long and generally been written off – wastelands, useless, remote
 , lifeless. Heefner traces the relationship between U.S. military enginee
 rs and their construction projects in the extremes beginning in the 1940s\
 , when the U.S. government realized it knew nothing about such places, th
 rough a Cold War near-obsession with mastering them, to the present day,
  when we find ourselves in the uncomfortable predicament that the U.S. mil
 itary might be the one organization that can best help navigate a world in
  which more and more of our environments are becoming extreme.  Gretchen H
 eefner is an Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University whe
 re she is also the Associate Director of the Center for International Affa
 irs and World Cultures. Her work centers on militarization, the environme
 nt, and the surprisingly intimate relations between national security reg
 imes and the everyday. Her first book, The Missile Next Door: The Minutem
 an in the American Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2012), was a Cho
 ice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013. Other work has appeared in Diplom
 atic History, Environmental History, Modern American History, the Weste
 rn Historical Quarterly, and the Pacific Historic Review. Her current boo
 k project, Sand, Snow, and Stardust: U.S. Military Engineers and the En
 vironmental Extremes will be published by the University of Chicago Press 
 in 2024.Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States and co-
 sponsored by the  Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toron
 to and the  Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Techno
 logy  \n\nContact Information: \n Centre for the Study of the United State
 s csus@utoronto.ca Centre for the Study of the United States \n\nSponsors 
 \nCentre for the Study of the United States \nMap \n1 Devonshire Place \n
 \nCategories \n Lecture \n\nAudiences \n All
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230328T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230328T180000
LAST-MODIFIED:20230315T151353Z
LOCATION:1 Devonshire Place
SUMMARY:From the Red Desert to the Red Planet: Military engineers, granula
 r materials, and how we know what we know about extreme environments with
  Gretchen Heefner
URL;TYPE=URI:https://www.humanities.utoronto.ca/events/red-desert-red-plane
 t-military-engineers-granular-materials-and-how-we-know-what-we-know
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