2025 Fall Conference
Registration for the conference is OPEN!
Conference Summary
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.
Conference Schedule
Thursday October 30
9-9:15 Welcome
9:15-10:45 Energy Sovereignties
Jennifer Eaglin, Ohio State University, “Alternative Energies, the Environment, and Development in Brazil”
Ashoka Manchala, University of Zurich, “Shifting Contexts of a Coal Company: The Singareni Collieries Company Limited and ‘Semi-sovereign’ Energy in Hyderabad, 1886-1952”
Comment: Elizabeth Chatterjee, University of Chicago
11:00-12:45 Energy Flows, Information Flows
Tom Cinq-Mars, Duke University, “In Search of “Friendship”: An Archaeology of the World’s Longest Oil Pipeline in the Soviet Bloc”
Amanda DeMarco, University of California San Diego, “China’s “Informational Opening”: Reform-Era PRC-FRG Coal Delegations as Market Research”
Elliott Sturtevant, Florida International University, “Nature’s Storehouse is Man’s Benefactor: Designing Infinite Growth along the Niagara Frontier”
Comment: Chris Jones, Arizona State
1:30-3:00 Coerced Energies
Parveen Kumar, University of Delhi, “Forced Labor and the Energy Infrastructure of Japanese Wartime Expansion in SE Asia”
Christian Robles-Baez, Stanford University, “Railwayless: How Human and Animal Power in Brazil Paved the Way for the Global Coffee Market”
Comment: Trish Kahle, Georgetown University Qatar
Friday October 31
9-10:45 Energy in the Home Beyond the Domestic
Minseok Jang, University of Albany, SUNY, “Burning from Below: Yeontan and the Birth of South Korean Environmentalism”
Alexandra Quantrill, Pratt Institute, “Women and the Grid: Electrical Experiments in 1920s Britain”
Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, University of North Texas, “Gunpowder, Industrial Capitalism, and Tata at the Piano”
Comment: Chelsea Schields, University of California - Irvine
11:00-12:45 Histories of Contemporary Technologies
Nancy Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, “Our Shared Ledger: A Parochial Energy History of Nuclear Carbon Capitalism in Northeastern Pennsylvania”
Laura Stark, Vanderbilt University, “How AI Went Nuclear: The Politics of Energy and Environment in Postwar Computer Science”
Karlyn Allenbrand, University of Delaware, “Solar Challenger: Energy, Environment, and the Spectacle of Solar Aviation, 1976-1981”
Comment: Jeffrey Manuel, Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville
1:00-2:00 General Discussion