Scholars
Elsa Devienne
Northumbria University
Based in
United Kingdom
Europe
Devienne is an environmental historian of the 20th-century US with expertise in coastal and oceanic history, urban history, and the history of waste and plastocs. She is the author of Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (OUP, 2024) – the first book to reveal the constructed nature of modern beaches based on the Los Angeles case. She is currently working on her second book, Plastics Protests: Mobilisations Against Plastics in the US and Beyond, which excavates the little-known history of the grassroots movement that challenged plastics’ ubiquity, toxicity, and contributions to climate change from the 1980s onwards.
Country(ies) of Specialty
United StatesFocus areas of expertise
Greenwashing History Climate Justice Social movementsHow to Connect
Publications
Articles
Devienne, Elsa. Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. Oxford University Press, 2024.
Winner of the 2025 W. Turrentine Jackson Book Prize awarded by the Western History Association for the best first book on any aspect of the history of the American West.
Winner of the 2025 Arthur Miller First Book Prize awarded by the Arthur Miller Institute at UEA for the best first book in American Studies.
Devienne, Elsa. “Making Plastics Count: Citizen Science Beach Cleanups and the Ocean Plastic Pollution Crisis (1980s–2020s).” Environmental History, vol. 30, no. 4, Oct. 2025, pp. 646–73. https://doi.org/10.1086/737351.
Devienne, Elsa.“Urban Renewal by the Sea: Reinventing the Beach for the Suburban Age in Postwar Los Angeles.” Journal of Urban History, vol. 45, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 99–125. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144217753379.
Platt, Louise, Devienne, Elsa, et al.“The ‘Walking/Wheeling With’ Framework: Establishing Walking/Wheeling with Children as a Mobility Justice Issue.” Forthcoming in Mobilities in Feb. 2026.
Devienne, Elsa and Perez Tisserand, Emmanuelle. “La matrice étatsunienne du Green Backlash,” in Steve Hagimont, Jean-Michel Hupé et Laure Teulières (eds.), Green Backlash: Manuel pour déconstruire l’anti-écologisme. Editions du Seuil, collection Ecocène, 2025.
Devienne, Elsa and Suarez, Camille. “How to Blow Up a Framework: Bringing Climate Change into the US History Survey,” in Pawley, Emily and Hui, Alexandra (eds.). A Historian’s Handbook to Saving the World. MIT Press, 2026.
Devienne, Elsa. Introduction to “CODE RED for American Studies: Embedding Climate and Environmental Justice in the American Studies Curriculum,” Transatlantica [Online], 2 | 2022, Online since 09 December 2022. DOI: 10.4000/transatlantica.20425