James Bradley is an urban environmental historian of the twentieth-century United States. His current book project, Toxic Assets, is a history of American solid waste management from the postwar period to the present. Detailing the breakdown of a publicly owned landfill infrastructure that entrenched an entitlement to make waste in American life, Toxic Assets argues that local politicians and environmentalists created a competitive market for waste as the solution to an emerging crisis of landfill capacity. It shows how local governments became players in a thriving domestic trade in trash, a trade that raised fundamental questions concerning the provisioning of essential services, environmental liability, and urban inequality. Prior to serving as a Teaching Fellow, James was a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life at the University of Southern California. He received his PhD in history, with distinction, from the University of Chicago in 2025 and graduated with a BA in history, highest honors, from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. His writing on the history of waste can be found in the journal California History.