2025 Fall Conference

Registration for the conference is OPEN!

Conference Narrative

Over the past decade, energy history has emerged as a vibrant subfield: the subject of growing numbers of books, dissertations, course offerings, and public history projects. This international conference brings together fourteen scholars from four continents to share papers that offer insights into how energy history can rewrite the narratives of our disciplines. Papers are organized into five panels over two days. “Energy Sovereignties” opens the conference on Oct. 30 with papers exploring how political entities in India and Brazil sought to shape energy development. Its is followed by the “Energy Flows, Information Flows” session with papers that locate energy practices in the geographic settings of China, Niagara Falls, and the Soviet bloc. A panel on “Coerced Labor” closes the Thursday sessions with papers on Japanese forced labor during World War II and Brazil unfree labor in its colonial era.  Friday’s Oct. 31 sessions open with the panel “Energy in the Home Beyond the Domestic” with papers on South Korea, Britain, and the US with a particular focus on women. The final session, “Histories of Contemporary Technologies,” brings us up to the late 20th century with studies that explore nuclear power and solar energy. 

As the Hagley library holds substantial research materials on energy, including coal, oil, and nuclear power, as well as on its distribution and consumption, we hope energy scholars interested in this conference will also look to see if our collections could support your project and an application for one of our research grants. More information is available here.