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Energy History Project

Joint Center for History
and Economics

Harvard University Center
for the Environment

Participants

 

Marian Aguiar is an Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.   Her research focuses on the dense and complicated relationship between mobility and modernity.  She examines how ideas circulate in a global context, and, especially, how the discourses of modernity and tradition become selectively appropriated, refashioned or even refused as they travel.  Aguiar's first book, Tracking Modernity: India, Trains, and the Culture of Mobility (University of Minnesota, 2011), explores cultural representations of modernity by considering how the railway was imagined in colonial, nationalist and postcolonial South Asian contexts.  Her current book project, Arranged Marriage (forthcoming University of Minnesota), looks at conjugal narratives in the South Asian diaspora in Britain and the United States within the context of transnational relations and movements.  Aguiar's articles have appeared in Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, and Journal of Modern Literature, among other journals, as well as in edited book collections.

 

Jakobina Arch is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University, and will be joining Whitman College as an Assistant Professor of History in the fall. Her research focuses on Japanese marine environmental history, with dissertation work examining the complex interactions between humans and whales in early modern Japan. The important role played by interactions between foreign whalers and Japanese fishermen during this period led her to this new environmental history project on the movement of Japanese castaways into far-flung areas of the Pacific basin, in comparison to the circumstances of foreign shipwrecks arriving in Japanese waters. Recent publications include the chapter "From Meat to Machine Oil: The Nineteenth-century Development of Whaling in Wakayama," in Japan at Nature's Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power, edited by Ian Jared Miller, Julia Adeney Thomas and Brett L. Walker (University of Hawaii Press, 2013).

 

Tarini Bedi is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research and teaching interests in urban and political anthropology, gender and space, globalization, anthropology of labor and work, the social life of transport and urban infrastructure, and mobilities.  She conducts her research in South and Southeast Asia.  She is currently working on the research and writing of a book manuscript tentatively entitled Everyday Technologies of the Urban: The Cultural Life of Motoring.  The manuscript is based on research that explores the lives of hereditary taxi-drivers in three cities: Mumbai, Manila and Singapore.  It seeks to develop and contribute to the understanding of comparative Asian urbanism, transformations of labor structures in Asian contexts of globalization, and the comparative study of the social networks of labor that surround transport infrastructures.

 

Sakura Christmas is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Harvard University, where she specializes in Japanese imperialism in China.  Her dissertation, "The Cartographic Steppe: Spaces of Development in Northeast Asia, 1895-1945," focuses on the role of social science and surveying technologies in the discourse about nomadic decline in Inner Mongolia.  Sakura recently completed eighteen months of archival research in China and Japan with support from the Fulbright-IIE, the Japan Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

 

Tim Cresswell is a Professor of History and International Affairs at Northeastern University, Boston.  Before that he was Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.  The author of four books on the role of place and mobility in cultural life (including On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (2006) and Place: A Short Introduction (2004)), his research considers modes of thinking that utilise notions of place, space and mobility to give the world value.  Tim is also a widely published poet and his first collection, Soil is published by Penned in the Margins Press (London, 2013).  He is currently working on a collection of essays on The Politics of Mobility as well as a monograph about the idea of place based on the Maxwell Street Market, Chicago.

 

Chihyung Jeon is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).  He received his Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and STS (Science, Technology, and Society) from MIT.  He then spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany.  Chihyung conducts research on the social and cultural relationship between humans and machines, including aircraft pilots as machine operators and as persons, 3D body scanning and national databases, and Korean visions of robot society.  He is also interested in technologies and politics of mobility in South Korea.  Chihyung has published an article on a Korean highway project in the 1960s and 1970s and his paper for this workshop extends his interest to more recent issues of engineering, politics, and mobility.

 

Elisabeth Köll is an Associate Professor in the Entrepreneurial Management unit at the Harvard Business School.  As a business historian with a specialization in Chinese business and socio-economic history, her research explores the legal and managerial evolution of enterprises in China and the process of industrialization and technology transfer throughout the twentieth century.  She is author of From Cotton Mill to Business Enterprise: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2003) and various articles.  Her current book project involves a multi-faceted analysis of how railroads as new technology and infrastructure contributed to China's economic and social transformation from 1895 to the present.

 

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. He obtained his B.A. from the University of Zimbabwe, his M.A. from the University of Witwatersrand, and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. His book, Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe, is coming out in June with MIT Press. Its main idea is to rethink wildlife poaching as a mobile site of innovation criminalized by colonial and postcolonial but undecolonized governments. Clapperton is finishing a second book, When the Tsetse Fly Moves: Animal-Mediated Environmental History, which explores how African knowledge and management of the mobilities of the tsetse fly before the colonial moment and how this knowledge formed the basis of colonial tsetse science and technologies. His research agenda is to think about what the concepts of technology, innovation, nature, and science might mean from an African perspective and its potential contributions to an Africa-centered policy agenda. He sees mobility as a critical archive and workspace within which such knowledge and practice are located.

 

Trent Maxey is an Associate Professor in the Departments of History and Asian Languages & Civilizations at Amherst College.  He received his Ph.D. in modern Japanese history from Cornell University in 2005.  His monograph, The "Greatest Problem": Defining State and Religion in Meiji Japan will be published by the Harvard East Asia Center in May 2014.  He teaches a wide range of courses, including an interdisciplinary seminar on the re-invention of Tokyo as an urban space in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  His newest research project, the history of automobility in twentieth-century Japan, grows out of this interest in the intersection of material technology, social practices, and political representation.

 

Quentin (Trais) Pearson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Cornell University.  His research and teaching interests focus on the history of law, science, and medicine in the colonial world, especially modern Southeast Asia.  His dissertation, "Bodies Politic: Civil Law & Forensic Medicine in Colonial Era Bangkok," is a study of legal and political contests over dead and dismembered bodies in the Siamese capital at the turn of the twentieth century (c. 1887-1907).  By focusing on the institutions and forms of knowledge meant to secure justice for such bodies, the dissertation offers a new narrative of the project of recovering Siamese political sovereignty in the era of high imperialism.  In part one of the dissertation, accidents and injuries on the tracks of the Bangkok Tramway Company (est. 1887) take center stage.  These quotidian tragedies reveal the social and technological forces—including rail travel, medical and legal expertise, and foreign-registered limited liability corporations—that helped to reshape compensatory practices and notions of liability in the Siamese capital.  The project has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (IIE) and the National Science Foundation.  

 

Stéphanie Ponsavady is an Assistant Professor of French Studies at Wesleyan University.  She holds a Ph.D. from New York University, where she received the Outstanding Dissertation Award in May 2013.  She is currently working on a book manuscript titled "Fueling Desire and Discontent: Cars and Roads in French Colonial Indochina," and has launched a related GIS project mapping colonial roads in Northern Vietnam under French rule.  She is an Affiliate with the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University.  Her research is at the junction of French Colonial History, Southeast Asian Studies, and French Studies.  She has published articles and reviews in Siksacakr: The Journal of Cambodia Research, The Journal of Transport History, Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, Mobility in History: The Yearbook of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility, and Les Annales.  She participated in the inaugural Summer School of the Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility in Berlin in 2011.  She will serve as Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University in spring 2015 on the research theme "Mobilities."

 

Emma Rothschild is Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University, Director of the Joint Centre for History and Economics, and Honorary Professor of History and Economics at the University of Cambridge.  She is a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.  She graduated from Oxford University in 1967, and was a Kennedy Scholar in Economics at MIT.  From 1978 to 1988, she was an Associate Professor at MIT in the Department of Humanities and the Program on Science, Technology, and Society.  She has also taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.  She has written extensively on economic history and the history of economic thought.  Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment was published in 2001 by Harvard University Press.  The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History was published by Princeton University Press in 2011.

 

Victor Seow is a historian of modern China with research interests in issues of energy, science and technology, the environment, business and labor, and state power.  His dissertation, "Carbon Technocracy: East Asian Energy Regimes and the Industrial Modern, 1900-1957," examines the history of the fossil fuel industry in Manchuria in the first half of the twentieth century.  Through this, the project explores the techniques and technologies by which states and their subsidiaries sought to master the energy resources that were becoming increasingly inseparable from the wider experience of the industrial modern age.  Victor is currently completing his Ph.D. at Harvard University, and will be joining Cornell University as Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History in the fall.

 

Paul Warde is a Reader in Economic and Environmental History at the University of East Anglia, and an Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge. He previously has held a research fellowship and lectureship at the University of Cambridge. He has written extensively on environmental, economic and social history, with interests focusing in particular upon the use of wood as a fundamental resource in pre-industrial society; the long-term history of energy use and its relationship with economic development; the history of prediction and modelling in thinking about the environment; and the development of institutions for regulating resources and welfare support. Current research projects include calculating energy embodied in world trade flows; the history of energy transitions and infrastructural development in the UK; the early modern potash trade; and fossil fuel exploration in the Arctic. He is preparing books on the history of thinking about sustainability from 1500 to 1840; and the history of the concept of 'the environment'. Recent publications include Power to the People: energy in Europe over the last five centuries (Princeton University Press, 2013) and The Future of Nature: documents of global change (Yale University Press, 2013). In 2008 he was a winner of the Phillip Leverhulme Prize.