I’m a Ph.D. candidate with a research focus on federal Native-American reservation land-use policy pertaining to rights of way determinations for energy, water, and transportation development. My dissertation (in-progress) looks at four Southern California tribes and their individual efforts to negotiate consent, consultation, and compensation for federal use of reservation lands. By using the over-arching theme of natural resource extrapolation, this effort intends to offer new insight into established notions of twentieth-century federal capitalist expansion/enterprise, and its long-term effect on Native-American sovereignty and tribal natural resources.

By trade, I’m an architectural historian with over thirteen years of experience in historical research, field inventory, and architectural resource evaluations. Since 2008, I’ve served as a cultural resources team member and project leader at ICF International, dedicated to the technical procedures supporting production of California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA)/National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and National Historic Preservation Act Section 106 compliance documents. This entails archival research, fieldwork inventories, authoring historic contexts, and evaluating the historical significance of built-environment resources using National Register of Historic Places and California Register of Historical Resources criteria. I record and assess the historical significance of numerous types of buildings and structures throughout California, including residential and commercial buildings, state-owned resources, large-scale water management and irrigation systems, public works infrastructure, railroad infrastructure, and historic bridges and highways. I meet the Secretary of the Interior’s Professional Qualifications Standards for work in history and architectural history, and I’m listed in the California Council for the Promotion of History’s Register of Professional Historians (#607).

Contact info:

David Lemon
Senior Architectural Historian
ICF International
630 K Street, Ste. 400
Sacramento, CA
95814