05/05/2026
Congratulations, Dr. Landry!😍👏
Dr. Marc Landry, Associate Professor in the History Department and Director of the Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies, has been awarded the prestigious George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in the field of environmental history for 2026. The prize, named after the early American conservationist and trailblazer for the global environmental movement, recognizes outstanding scholarship in the field.
Landry’s book, Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age, was published by Stanford University Press. The award honors it as the best book in environmental history in 2025.
The George Perkins Marsh Prize is presented annually at the meeting of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), a pioneer organization in the field at its inception in 1977. Landry received the award at this year’s conference in Kansas City on March 27.
According to the ASEH the prize "recognizes works that offer innovative, deeply researched perspectives on environmental history, often bridging ecological analysis with social, economic, and political contexts."
The prize committee found Mountain Battery advanced “a new take on the global history of electrification.” Committee members further concluded the book was a “highly original analysis that uses a geophysical prism—the "alpine damscape"—to rethink both European history and energy history. Although the histories are saturated in coal through the centrality of the Industrial Revolution, Landry reveals how hydropower converted from Alpine waterways, the titular mountain battery, powered multiple nation-building and war-making projects.”
With this award, Landry’s research into the history of the Alps as an energy landscape joins a broader international conversation about the origins and impacts of the emergence of high-energy societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This marks Landry’s second major recognition for the book. In the fall of 2025, he also received the Baker-Burton Award for the best first book in European history by a scholar of a Southern college or university.
