2025 Fall Conference
Registration for the conferences 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.
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Call for Papers
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. Yet despite this vibrancy, the field has not yet managed to turn energy into an indispensable analytic in the histories of labor and political economy, broadly construed as the history of capitalism. This conference invites emerging and established scholars to share papers that offer insights into how energy history can affect scholarship on the history of capitalism and technology writ large. We are particularly interested in papers that aim to demonstrate how energy history can rewrite the narratives of subfields that have historically been underrepresented in energy history, and papers that consider energy as a lens as well as an object of study. From these papers we plan to publish an edited collection suitable for classroom use that can be used to expand awareness of energy history’s accomplishments and insights.
We are interested in original, unpublished, empirical papers that are conceptually informed and historically framed addressing the above and related topics. 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 to consider proposals that benefit from engagement with Hagley resources. However, we also welcome papers that use collections from other institutions. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
- slavery as an energy regime
- energy histories of U.S. empire
- U.S.-Indigenous relationships
- energy as a lens to study social relations and everyday life
- relationships between energy producers and energy consumers
- the racialization of energy sources
- energy, politics, and regulation
- environmental consequences of energy extraction, generation, transmission, and consumption
Please submit proposals of no more than 500 words and a one-page C.V. to Carol Lockman at clockman@Hagley.org by June 1, 2025. Conference presenters will be asked to submit complete versions of their conference papers by Sept 26, 2025. The conference is planned as an in-person event but will adopt a virtual format if necessary. Presenters will receive lodging in the conference hotel and compensation for their travel costs. The program committee is comprised of Trish Kahle, Greg Hargreaves, and Roger Horowitz.