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Department of

History

Linderman Library Rotunda stained glass dome
Owain Lawson wearing a grey button down shirt smiling for his headshot in front of a blackdrop.

Owain Lawson

Assistant Professor

owl324@lehigh.edu
0009 - Maginnes Hall
Education:

PhD, History, Columbia University

MA & MPhil, History, Columbia University

MA, Middle East Studies, The American University in Cairo

BA, English, Concordia University (Montréal)

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Additional Interests

  • Environmental History
  • Historical Political Ecology
  • Environmental Justice
  • History of Technology
  • Climate History
  • Energy Humanities

Research Statement

Owain Lawson (he/him) is a historian of environment, development, and social movements in the modern Middle East. His research and teaching explore how to draw lessons from earlier eras of massive transformation in the built and natural environment for the climate challenges we face today. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, Power Failures: Development, Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice in Lebanon, a transnational history of Lebanon’s Litani River in the twentieth century. You can learn more about Owain and this book in this presentation at the NC State University Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies. 

Fellowships and grants from the Social Science Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Max Weber Stiftung, Doris G. Quinn Foundation, and Columbia's Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life have supported this research.

Biography

Owain Lawson is a historian of environment, imperialism, and social movements in the modern Middle East. He serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal.

Prior to joining Lehigh, Owain was Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Environmental History at Cardiff University, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oberlin College. He has also been fellow-in-residence at the Orient-Institut Beirut and the American University of Beirut’s Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies. He teaches through Columbia and Cornell University’s Prison Education Programs. He is originally from Ottawa, Canada.

Selected Recent Publications
“Vernacular Development, Drought, and US Technical Assistance in Postcolonial Lebanon.” Past & Present 270 (February 2026).

“Organised Abandonment in Lebanon’s Litani River Basin.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (online first, November 2024).

“A National Vocation: Engineering Nature and State in Lebanon’s Merchant Republic.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 40, no. 1 (May 2021). Winner of the 2023 Martha Trescott Prize, Society for the History of Technology.

With Gabi Kirk, “Environmental Crisis as Event and Structure.” Introduction to special Essays section, “Critical Environmental Perspectives in Middle East Studies.” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 2 (2022).

“Crisis and Change: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Climate in the Middle East.” Introduction to edited roundtable. Jadaliyya, 26 April 2021.

Review of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon, by Hicham Safieddine. Arab Studies Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Spring 2021).

“The Past and Present of Electricity in Lebanon.” Jadaliyya, 2 May 2019.

Teaching

HIST/EVST 006 Global Environmental Histories
HIST/EVST 108 Climate and Energy in Modern History
HIST/EVST 396/496 Social Movements and the Environment