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Robert Lifset

Robert D. Lifset

Associate Professor of History

Associate Professor of History

Location: Boren Hall 152

E-mail: robertlifset@ou.edu

Phone: 405-325-2594

Education

  • Ph. D., M.Phil., M.A., History, Columbia University
  • A.B., History with Honors, The University of Chicago

Robert Lifset's research and teaching interests focus on energy history broadly defined. This includes the business, policy, political, environmental, social, and cultural history of energy with a focus, though not exclusive, on the United States in the 20th Century. 

He is the author of Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), and winner of the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in 2016. He is the editor of American Energy Policy in the 1970s (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014) and American Energy Cinema (with Sarah Stanford McIntyre and Raechel Lutz, West Virginia University Press, 2023).

Before joining the Honors College, Professor Lifset taught at Barnard, Columbia, the University of North Florida, and the University of Houston.

Lifset is currently writing an environmental history of the energy crisis of the 1970s.

Research Interests

  • Energy History
  • Environmental History
  • Modern U.S. History 

Courses Taught

  • HON 2973 Energy in U.S. History
  • HON 2973 The Atom in the American Experience
  • HON 3993 Oil in World History
  • HON 3993 Petroleum Cinema
  • HON 3993 America in the 1970s

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