Boyd Ruamcharoen

Boyd Ruamcharoen is a historian who bridges environmental history, the history of science and technology, and the history of U.S. foreign relations in the twentieth century. His current book project, tentatively entitled Empire of Rot: How Decay Remade American Power, uses the history of the pursuit of weatherability—the ability of materials to withstand harsh environments—to tell a new story about builders and critics of the U.S. empire in the twentieth century. Designed for temperate climates by default, American materials and technologies rapidly degraded in the tropics. Electronics grew moldy, fabrics mildewed, and whole archives disintegrated. From the steaming Pacific jungles of World War II and long after, rot continued to bedevil the rising U.S. empire as it sent objects deeper into extreme environments. But rot was not just a technical problem to be solved; it was also a resource for political imagination. U.S. scientists sought to control decay to expand U.S. power, while their counterparts in tropical Global South countries conducted "tropicalization" research to achieve technological self-sufficiency. Environmentalists, by contrast, advocated for technologies that embraced rather than resisted decomposition to honor ecological principles. As Empire of Rot argues, wrestling with rot generated competing technological and ecological visions that both supported and challenged U.S. global power.

Boyd earned his PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2025. His work has appeared in Technology and Culture and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. His article has won the Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and the Maurice Daumas Prize from the International Committee on the History of Technology (ICOHTEC). Additionally, his dissertation received an honorable mention for the Coffman First-Manuscript Prize from the Society for Military History and won the Obama Dissertation Prize in Transnational American Studies. His research has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the Taylor-Wei Dissertation Fellowship in the History of Meteorology, and other organizations.

You can learn more about his work on his website: boydruamch.com.