CfP: Energy History Working Group
Priority Deadline: August 15, 2025
Submit to: Robert Lifset at: robertlifset “at” ou.edu
The Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Working Groups brings together scholars from around the world in online forum to share their works-in-progress on specialized topics in the history of science, technology and medicine. https://www.chstm.org/.
The Energy History Working Group solicits work from within the field of energy history for our 2025-2026 schedule. Meetings will begin in October and will be held the second Friday of each month at 12:30 EST. Meetings will be held via Zoom. A full schedule can be found here: https://www.chstm.org/content/energy-history.
The Energy History Working Group seeks to highlight work that provides new analytical focus for the study of energy and its history. We solicit papers that access the deep linkages between business, labor, and environmental history as well as issues of technological development, cultural production, and scientific experimentation. Access to desirable minerals – from coal to oil to rare earths has been a limiting factor in the design of energy technologies, systems, and consumption habits. Control over energy systems, networks, and infrastructures have ramifications for politicians, individuals, and societies. Globalized capitalism has depended upon intricate communication and trade networks that have relied on abundant and cheap energy. Energy scholarship prioritizes the large role that networks – including supply chains, labor regimes, diplomatic connections, trade systems, and financial institutions – have played in the development of technologies and in crafting everything from health and medical standards to large-scale infrastructure projects. The sometimes unintended consequences of such systems, from the destruction of older patterns of work to their local and global impacts on public health are still being teased out by a generation of historians and social scientists. However, there is still much more work to be done in this evolving field.
The co-conveners welcome papers on the following (and related) topics:
Submissions will be accepted until all dates are filled, however priority will be given to abstracts submitted by August 15, 2025.