Energy in the Americas Book Launch

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Book Launch: Energy in the Americas: Critical Reflections on Energy and History

Calgary Institute for the Humanities

December 8, 2021 – 11am MST


Join Dr. Amelia Kiddle (Associate Professor of Latin American history at the University of Calgary) and Dr. Petra Dolata (Associate Professor of Energy History at the University of Calgary) and the Energy In Society Working Group at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, for the launch of Energy in the Americas: Critical Reflections on Energy and History, the second book in the University of Calgary Press’s Energy Histories, Cultures, and Politics series.

Bringing the diverse energy histories of North and South American nations into dialogue with one another, this edited volume presents an integrated hemispheric framework for understanding the historical constructions of contemporary debates on the role of energy in society. Rejecting past truisms, this collection historicizes the experiences of producers and policymakers and assesses the interplay between environmental, technological, political, and ideological influences within and between countries and continents. 

Join the authors in discussing the book’s contributions and celebrating its publication (get an open access copy of the book and view the table of contents here). Dr. Dolata will introduce the series, followed by Dr. Kiddle who will summarize the book’s significance. Dr. Pablo Heidrich (Associate Professor of Global and International Studies, Carleton University) and Dr. Tyler Priest (Associate Professor of History and Geography, University of Iowa) will briefly discuss the promises and potential pitfalls of thinking about energy hemispherically within the context of their own contributions to the volume and broader debates in the field, followed by a general discussion with the contributors and the audience.

Dr. Kiddle is Associate Professor of Latin American history at the University of Calgary. Energy in the Americas: Critical Reflections on Energy and History is the result of a SSHRC-supported conference of the same name held in 2014. Her monograph, Mexico’s Relations with Latin America during the Cárdenas Era, which is based upon her University of Arizona doctoral dissertation (winner of the 2010 Premio Genaro Estrada from the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs) was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2016. As an outgrowth of this project, she developed an interest in the place of the Mexican oil expropriation of 1938 in inter-American affairs. She and María Cecilia Zuleta, her colleague in Mexico, published an anthology of newspaper articles from Latin America reacting to the expropriation and they have begun work on a co-authored book tentatively titled The Mexican Oil Expropriation of 1938 and the Roots of Resource Nationalism in Latin America, a project which is supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Dr. Kiddle spent 2017-2018 working on this project as a fellow of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities.

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Amelia M. Kiddle is Associate Professor of History at the University of Calgary, in Treaty Seven Territory. Her research focuses on the history of Mexican foreign relations.

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