About

Richard F. Hirsh is a professor of history at Virginia Tech, located in the Department of History. His current research is policy oriented and involves historical issues related to the restructuring of the American electric utility system. His work has been featured in media outlets such as the Roanoke Times, Mother Jones, and Marketplace, where he discusses topics including infrastructure, energy, and utility fraud. His scholarly contributions include the book 'Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry' and articles like 'Powering American Farms.' He is engaged in exploring the historical aspects of science, technology, medicine, and the environment, with a focus on policy and industry transformation.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Knowledge management
• Geography
• Engineering
• Law
• Library science
• Engineering ethics
• Business

Selected publications

• Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States <i>by Sandeep Vaheesan</i>

  Political Science Quarterly · 2025-12-15

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1414P Therapeutic potential of precision oncology in salivary duct carcinoma (SDC): A next generation sequencing (NGS) analysis of 423 tumors

  Annals of Oncology · 2025-09-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner

  Technology and Culture · 2023-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner Richard F. Hirsh (bio) Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future By James Morton Turner. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. Pp. 234. With floods, droughts, and wildfires wreaking social and economic havoc around the world, policy-makers have begun taking climate change—and efforts to mitigate it—more seriously. Electric vehicles (EVs) have gained popularity because they operate without fossil fuels and produce no emissions. Government incentives in Norway, for example, helped make EVs the choice of 65 percent of new passenger car purchases in 2021. Meanwhile, California regulators approved policies in 2022 to require all new-car sales to be electric starting in 2035. The utility of electric vehicles depends on rechargeable batteries, which in turn require large amounts of exotic and often toxic materials. And here lies the crux of the EV policy quandary, as James Turner, a Ph.D. historian and environmental studies professor at Wellesley College, expounds in Charged. Although electricity storage devices have become more efficient in recent decades, the author explains, their components are largely mined and processed in distant countries. Moreover, those nations' governments generally allow exploitative and dangerous extractive techniques that impose environmental, health, and economic burdens on people who have little capacity to bear them. Climate change mitigation, in other words, comes at the cost of various injustices. Charged is not a traditional historical monograph that delves deeply into the technical or social origins of a technology. Turner honestly admits as much, explaining that his study does not include "the attention to contingency, agency, and context that historians of technology value" (p. 14). Rather, the author describes facets of batteries' evolution to highlight misgivings about the current path of energy policy. For example, for more than a century, lead-acid batteries have become the most frequently employed rechargeable energy storage devices in the telephone, electric utility, and automobile industries. Recognizing that lead in the batteries causes environmental and human health harms, the manufacturing industry has managed to recycle more than 97 percent of the metal, making the power packs appear benign. Yet Turner notes that during the mining, processing, and recycling of lead, small amounts of the metal still enter the environment, resulting in lead poisoning (and ensuing cognitive deficits) in about one in three children globally. Recycling alone, therefore, does not constitute a solution to problems associated with the processing of dangerous materials. Turner further invalidates misapprehensions about single-use batteries that inhabit so many of our remote controls, flashlights, and other electronic devices. Incremental innovation has yielded increasingly powerful and portable forms of energy, but their production consumes tremendous resources. Happily, manufacturers have eliminated mercury in widely used [End Page 595] alkaline batteries, such that they impose little environmental damage when discarded with everyday garbage. But the author argues that whereas recycling such batteries may make people think they are acting responsibly, the process remains inefficient, with the cost of recycling far exceeding its benefits. He even admits that, as a result of his research, he trashes his own single-use batteries. Such myth-busting analyses provide a relevant introduction for discussing the development and use of the lithium-ion batteries employed in electric vehicles. Improvements to these batteries have occurred rapidly since the 1990s, enabling them to store about three times the energy available in earlier rechargeable technologies. But the future demand for the materials going into the batteries, such as lithium, cobalt, manganese, and nickel, will require massive mining and processing enterprises around the world. Even recycling 100 percent of today's batteries will not yield the ingredients needed—about six times more than we currently use—to achieve clean energy goals. The production and processing of those substances have already been accompanied by social abuses (such as the exploitation of child labor) and environmental degradation in South America, Africa, China, and Russia. Overall, Charged provides an insightful (though not truly historical) understanding of the rarely considered consequences of electric-vehicle policies. The book also offers recommendations, such as the need to expand American mining and refining of critical metals to reduce supply...

  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Unarticulated Identities and Values on Energy Policy

  2022-12-12

  book-chapterSenior author

  The enthusiasm for renewable energy in the rural Midwest of the United States reveals valuable insights about people’s interactions with technology. This chapter argues that unarticulated identities held by technological users affect the outcome of energy transitions. Discourse analysis of farmers, policymakers, and business leaders demonstrates that unexpressed identities underlie rational arguments offered to justify the acceptance or rejection of energy technologies. This piece argues that this formation of identity using technology influences energy policy, especially on the local and state levels. By focusing on this little-studied area that accentuates unarticulated identity, one can better explain why traditionally conservative Republican states surprisingly lead the nation in promoting energy transitions that are often advocated by liberal politicians. Though this chapter uses reception of renewable energy by Midwesterners as the case example, it applies a novel approach for evaluating other energy systems by focusing on unarticulated identities that can be understood through discourse analysis. This study proves especially useful by shifting focus from economic incentives or environmental concerns to consideration of cultural values. The approach can aid policymakers and business leaders by de-emphasizing grassroots citizens’ movements and underscoring the significance of people’s unspoken identities that influence attitudes toward energy technologies.

  PublisherDOI

• Powering American Farms

  Johns Hopkins University Press eBooks · 2022 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Geography
  PublisherDOI

• The Developing World Outreach Initiative

  CRC Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Library science

  The Developing World Outreach Initiative (DWOI) has been expanding the reach and practice of occupational hygiene in the developing world for over 15 years. During that time, it has created a dynamic organization that has provided resources, training, and technical assistance on a variety of topics to dozens of organizations and nations around the world. Built upon a collaborative network of partnerships with other like-minded organizations, DWOI has funded and completed research on workplace hazards in several nations and industries. And they have supported the development of interventions and controls to lessen the workplace exposure to hazardous working conditions and agents. Other projects included distribution of industrial hygiene equipment, analytical laboratory support, and a program to distribute books and training materials to economically developing nations.

  PublisherDOI

• A Framework for Sustainable Siting of Wind Energy Facilities: Economic, Social, and Environmental Factors

  University Press of Colorado eBooks · 2020-12-07

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Sociotechnical agendas: Reviewing future directions for energy and climate research

  Energy Research & Social Science · 2020 · 341 citations

  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Sociology

  The field of science and technology studies (STS) has introduced and developed a “sociotechnical” perspective that has been taken up by many disciplines and areas of inquiry. The aims and objectives of this study are threefold: to interrogate which sociotechnical concepts or tools from STS are useful at better understanding energy-related social science, to reflect on prominent themes and topics within those approaches, and to identify current research gaps and directions for the future. To do so, the study builds on a companion project, a systematic analysis of 262 articles published from 2009 to mid-2019 that categorized and reviewed sociotechnical perspectives in energy social science. It identifies future research directions by employing the method of “co-creation” based on the reflections of sixteen prominent researchers in the field in late 2019 and early 2020. Drawing from this co-created synthesis, this study first identifies three main areas of sociotechnical perspectives in energy research (sociotechnical systems, policy, and expertise and publics) with 15 topics and 39 subareas. The study then identifies five main themes for the future development of sociotechnical perspectives in energy research: conditions of systematic change; embedded agency; justice, power, identity and politics; imaginaries and discourses; and public engagement and governance. It also points to the recognized need for pluralism and parallax: for research to show greater attention to demographic and geographical diversity; to stronger research designs; to greater theoretical triangulation; and to more transdisciplinary approaches.

  PublisherDOI

• Sociotechnical Agendas: Reviewing Future Directions for Energy and Climate Research

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-12-01

  articleOpen access

  The field of science and technology studies (STS) has introduced and developed a “sociotechnical” perspective that has been taken up by many disciplines and areas of inquiry. The aims and objectives of this study are threefold: to interrogate which sociotechnical concepts or tools from STS are useful at better understanding energy-related social science, to reflect on prominent themes and topics within those approaches, and to identify current research gaps and directions for the future. To do so, the study builds on a companion project, a systematic analysis of 262 articles published from 2009 to mid-2019 that categorized and reviewed sociotechnical perspectives in energy social science. It identifies future research directions by employing the method of “co-creation” based on the reflections of sixteen prominent researchers in the field in late 2019 and early 2020. Drawing from this co-created synthesis, this study first identifies three main areas of sociotechnical perspectives in energy research (sociotechnical systems, policy, and expertise and publics) with 15 topics and 39 subareas. The study then identifies five main themes for the future development of sociotechnical perspectives in energy research: conditions of systematic change; embedded agency; justice, power, identity and politics; imaginaries and discourses; and public engagement and governance. It also points to the recognized need for pluralism and parallax: for research to show greater attention to demographic and geographical diversity; to stronger research designs; to greater theoretical triangulation; and to more transdisciplinary approaches.

  Publisher

• Physical parameters of selected <i>Gaia</i> mass asteroids

  Astronomy and Astrophysics · 2019-12-31 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  Context. Thanks to the Gaia mission, it will be possible to determine the masses of approximately hundreds of large main belt asteroids with very good precision. We currently have diameter estimates for all of them that can be used to compute their volume and hence their density. However, some of those diameters are still based on simple thermal models, which can occasionally lead to volume uncertainties as high as 20–30%. Aims. The aim of this paper is to determine the 3D shape models and compute the volumes for 13 main belt asteroids that were selected from those targets for which Gaia will provide the mass with an accuracy of better than 10%. Methods. We used the genetic Shaping Asteroids with Genetic Evolution (SAGE) algorithm to fit disk-integrated, dense photometric lightcurves and obtain detailed asteroid shape models. These models were scaled by fitting them to available stellar occultation and/or thermal infrared observations. Results. We determine the spin and shape models for 13 main belt asteroids using the SAGE algorithm. Occultation fitting enables us to confirm main shape features and the spin state, while thermophysical modeling leads to more precise diameters as well as estimates of thermal inertia values. Conclusions. We calculated the volume of our sample of main-belt asteroids for which the Gaia satellite will provide precise mass determinations. From our volumes, it will then be possible to more accurately compute the bulk density, which is a fundamental physical property needed to understand the formation and evolution processes of small Solar System bodies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• EPNES: A Holistic Approach to the Design and Management of a Secure and Efficient Distributed Generation Power System

  NSF · $470k · 2003–2007

Frequent coauthors

• Norman McCain

  The University of Texas at Austin

  16 shared

• G Neelakantan

  German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence

  16 shared

• Heather R. Turner

  University of York

  16 shared

• Y Arambulchai

  German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence

  16 shared

• Artur Mikitiuk

  16 shared

• Michel Cayrol

  Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier

  16 shared

• Carina Kreitz

  German Sport University Cologne

  16 shared

• K E -Hindi

  University of York

  16 shared

Labs

• Department of History, Virginia TechPI