Boyd Ruamcharoen

I am a historian who works across environmental history, the history of science and technology, and U.S. foreign relations history. My work also engages with media studies and science and technology studies (STS). Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global American Studies in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. In 2025, I earned my PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

My current book project, Empire of Rot, tells a history of the science and engineering of weatherable materials for the tropics, revealing how weatherproofing became a central tool—and eventually, a vulnerability—of U.S. empire and of postcolonial worldmaking in the twentieth century. In tropical climates, American technologies designed for the temperate zone quickly decayed and rotted. In the Pacific Theater during World War II, this became a serious problem known as “tropical deterioration,” prompting a surge in weatherability research and innovation in the United States. By tracing a longer history of weatherability science from the U.S. acquisition of tropical territories after 1898 to the environmentalist movement in the 1970s, I show how the U.S. empire increasingly relied on weatherproofing as its strategy shifted from colonial control of lands to mobile instruments of power—yet this reliance turned into a liability when decomposition defied control. As the United States turned into a rotting empire, it created a fertile ground for alternative worldmaking projects that challenged the U.S. empire from both postcolonial and environmentalist perspectives.

My work has been generously supported by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution, the Taylor-Wei Dissertation Fellowship in the History of Meteorology, the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy, and the Science History Institute, among other organizations.

You can download my (abbreviated) CV as a PDF file here (last updated December 11, 2025).