The Fellowship Committee of NESAH is pleased to announce Charlotte Leib as the recipient of the 2025 Robert Rettig Annual Meeting Fellowship.

Charlotte is a sixth-year PhD Candidate in History at Yale University, where she primarily researches, teaches, and writes about American energy history and histories of the built environment. Originally trained in architecture and landscape architecture, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Princeton University and dual Masters Degrees in Landscape Architecture and in the History & Philosophy of Design from Harvard University. Her dissertation examines how meadow plants, technologies, and ideologies shaped larger patterns of colonization, climate change, and urbanization along the Northeastern Atlantic seaboard during the transition from the organic to fossil economies, using the Meadowlands of New Jersey / Lenapehoking as a central case study. She has forthcoming work in the Journal of Energy History and the edited volume New Jersey's Natures: Environmental Histories of the Garden State (Rutgers University Press, 2026).

The Rettig Fellowship will support Charlotte's attendance at the annual SAH conference in Atlanta this April, where she will share some of her dissertation research on the panel "Dividing Lines: The Legacy of the Interstate in the American City". Her paper at the conference will demonstrate how the ubiquitous use of sand drain technology in the construction highway infrastructure over marshlands ecologically transformed the Meadowlands and how artists and engineers conceptualized and constructed solid ground in the 1930's through 1960's.

Congratulations, Charlotte!