Lauren Kelly

Lauren Kelly is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Van Hunnick Department of History at USC. Her research reframes a seminal event in water history of the U.S. West: the story of how Los Angeles seized water from Payahuunadü (the Owens Valley). Most scholars and the broader public understand this water transfer through the lens of the first Los Angeles Aqueduct, which the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) completed in 1913. However, to truly comprehend both the environmental and human impacts of LADWP’s water extraction, it is crucial to turn our gaze to the decades following this first piece of infrastructure. By providing a diverse and multi-generational study of one of the most famous water transfers in the U.S. West, Lauren demonstrates how resource extraction creates long-term, transformative relationships that are comprehensible only over an extended time scale. Lauren’s project argues that, in our era of ever-increasing demands for water, this knowledge will help us craft plans to address water precarity that are inclusive to all communities.

Lauren is dedicated to serving her department and broader historical community. She served as the President of USC’s History Graduate Student Association for two years, where she created an array of new initiatives to develop a greater community among graduate students. She also led the department’s Cohen Lecture Committee for two years, which hosts a prestigious speaker each year on USC’s campus. Lauren is currently a Graduate Student Representative for the Western Association of Women Historians.

For the 2024-2025 school year, Lauren received the USC Mellon Humanities in a Digital World Dissertation Fellowship to support her digital humanities work. This fellowship will build on Lauren’s previous year as a Haynes Lindley Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. Additionally, she has won several fellowships related to Indigenous history and environmental history, such as the Phillips Fund for Native American Research Grant, the USC Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability Graduate Fellowship, and the Mellon Sawyer “Precarious Ecologies” Dissertation Fellowship. She has also received awards such as the 2024 Richard Cone Award for exemplary community-engaged scholarship and the John R. Hubbard Award for departmental leadership during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• BA Univ Calif Berkeley, 5/2018