Elsa Devienne

Elsa Devienne is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Northumbria University in the UK. Raised in Paris, France, Devienne became hooked on American history and culture while spending a year teaching French at Dartmouth College. She soon got her doctorate from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales before embarking on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. She has since worked and taught in universities in the US, the UK, and France.

Elsa Devienne’s research interests are diverse, but they all converge in a passion for environmental justice. Whether writing about beaches, plastics, or cities, her research shows how our environments have been changed to benefit the livelihoods and health of some people to the detriment of others—often the most vulnerable communities.

Her first book, Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, was published with Oxford University Press (2024) and with Sorbonne Editions (2020, French version). The book recounts the formidable beach modernization campaign that transformed Los Angeles into one of the world’s greatest coastal metropolises, revealing how the city’s man-made shores served as a central locus for the reinvention of seaside leisure and the triumph of modern bodies. It won the 2021 Willi Paul Adams Award awarded by the Organization of American Historians for the best book on American history published in a language other than English and the 2025 Arthur Miller Institute First Book Prize.