Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Sara Grossman has been awarded the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts for her book Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy.
In the book, published in 2023 by Duke University Press, Grossman explores the relationship between climate data and state power in key moments in the history of American weather science.
Grossman is currently the 2025–2026 Barron Visiting Professor at Princeton University, where she is continuing research for her second book, tentatively titled Fighting for a Livable Future: A Natural History of Disabled Life and Organizing, 1945 to the present. The aim of the book, she says, is to uncover the ways that disabled communities have fought for habitable and just worlds — from ramps to breathable air — across the mid-to-late 20th century.
"I am interested in how these histories can be incorporated into environmental and climate justice narratives," Grossman says. "Disabled communities have unique and valuable contributions to make to the history of knowing environments and living within hostile ones. Fighting for a Livable Future will reveal how disabled communities have lived and even thrived amid body burdens, ill health, and legacies of toxic exposure as they modify, repair, and contest a world that is not made for their bodies and minds."
Grossman is also teaching a new course at Princeton called "Earth Mending," which she hopes to offer at Bryn Mawr in the future.
"Earth Mending asks what recuperative practices — such as carework, mending, stewardship, and reparation — have to offer to our individual lives, to the persistence of communities, to the soil, air, and water, during times of ecological and humanistic crisis," she says.
