Global Energy Cultures: How Energy Shapes Our Everyday Lives

Nadya Sbaiti (Moderator)

Nadya Sbaiti is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at GU-Q. She specializes in the social and cultural histories of the modern Middle East, with a focus on the Arab world. Her research foci include gender, education and nation building; tourism, class, and mobility in the post-WWI Levant; and science fiction as historical method. She is co-editor of the volume Practicing Sectarianism: Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2022) and has authored journal articles, book chapters, essays on pedagogy, and archival research guides. She has delivered research talks internationally, including at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City; American University in Cairo; University of California at Davis; Harvard University; Singapore Art Museum; and Darat al-Funun in Amman. She teaches Middle-East focused courses that include introductory surveys, as well as courses on women and gender, the history of education, science fiction, and uprisings in historical perspective.

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Marwa Koheji

Marwa Koheji is a research fellow in the Humanities Fellowship for the study of the Arab World at NYUAD. She is currently preparing a book manuscript that draws on her research entitled Cooling the Arab Gulf: How Air-conditioning Changed Everything. Beyond academia, she published her research in journals aimed at broader audiences. More recently, she was a participant in Bahrain’s national pavilion at Venice Biennale of Architecture, which centered on theme of cooling and sustainability. Along her academic research, she has a professional background in the heritage industry, working with Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities on different national and World Heritage projects.

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Diana Montaño

Diana J. Montaño is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a cultural historian of modern Mexico, and the core of her intellectual endeavor has been how Mexicans have imagined, adopted, adapted, built, deployed, and experienced technologies in constructing their society. Her first monograph, Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City (University of Texas Press, 2021), is a cultural, social, and political history of how residents of Mexico City shaped the electrification of their spaces from the 1880s to the 1960s. Her work has appeared in Technology and Culture, History of Technology, Technology’s Stories and the Hispanic American Historical Review. She is also co-editor of the University of Nebraska Press’ book series Confluencias on Mexican history.

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Abigail Harrison Moore

Abigail Harrison Moore is Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Leeds and was Head of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies until August 2019. Her research focuses on art and design history of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, particularly the Arts and Crafts Movement. She has more recently been working on an international project on gender and the histories and cultures of energy supply, leading to the publication of her co-edited book – In a New Light; Histories of Women and Energy (MQUP, 2021). In the UK, she is very focussed on creative education in schools, has helped develop the curriculum in her subject areas and has written widely on the educational challenges for young people from low social and economic groups and the ‘problem’ of cultural capital. She is currently combining these two strands of her research and practice for her AHRC Research, Engagement and Innovation Fellowship, working with Leeds Museum’s Preservative Party of 14-24 year olds on a participatory research project to co-produce histories of women and energy in the home.