Dr. Petra Dolata

Biography

I am an energy historian with a background in both International History and International Relations. Before joining the University of Calgary in July 2014 I was a lecturer at King's College London, UK, first in War Studies (2007-2010) and then in International Politics (2010-2014). At King's I was also the Research Director of the European Centre for Energy and Resource Security EUCERS. From 2002 to 2007 I was Assistant Professor of North American History at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

I hold a Master's degree in American Studies from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where I also received my PhD in International Relations with a study on US-German (energy) relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which was published in 2006 with Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften (Die deutsche Kohlenkrise in nationalen und transatlantischen Kontext).

From 2014 until 2019 I was Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in the History of Energy. I am currently the Scholar in Residence at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities (CIH), where I also co-convene the Energy In Society working group. I was the 2022 Rachel Carson Simone Veil Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and Project House Europe, both located at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany (Project: Energy Transitions as Lived Experience: A Transnational Study of Deindustrializing Coal Regions in Europe Since 1945). In 2021 I was a FRIAS Senior Fellow (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow of the European Union) at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), University of Freiburg, Germany with a project on Women in Energy Transitions: Agency, Resilience and Complicity. At the University of Calgary, I am also a Member of ABBY-Net (The Albertan-Bavarian Research Network for Sustainable Energy Transitions).

My current research interests include European and North American energy history after 1945 as well as the history and politics of the Canadian and circumpolar Arctic. I have published on Canada's foreign and Arctic policies, transatlantic relations, and the concept of energy security. I was the principal investigator of a research project funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) entitled “The 1970s Energy Crises and Energy Security: A Cross-national and Transatlantic History” (2017-2022). Focusing on five countries – Canada, the United States, the UK, the Netherlands and West Germany – I am tracing the emergence of energy as an important political issue and energy security as a powerful story that develop in response to the various energy crises of the 1970s. In addition, using oral and everyday historical sources, I am exploring how people have made sense of energy in the 1970s, how it intersected with environmental discussions and how it linked to deindustrialization in some of these countries. As a co-investigator in another SSHRC-funded research project on Brexit led by Achim Hurrelmann, Carleton University (The Reconfiguration of Canada-Europe Relations after Brexit) and which examines how Canada’s transatlantic relationship with various partners in Europe is affected by Brexit, I am focusing on energy and environmental aspects of the Canada-Europe relationship and use an approach informed by historical institutionalism to discuss Canada - Europe relations. I am also one of the lead scholars on a 7-year SSHRC-funded Partnership project on Deindustrialization and the Politics of our Time (2020-2027). Based at the University of Concordia's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling under the direction of Steven High, the goal of the project is to understand the deep roots, experiences and long-term consequences of deindustrialization across six countries. Since 2022 I collaborate with the Sahtú Renewable Resources Board (SRRB) on a SSHRC-funded (Engage Grant) project that examines the history and legacies of oil and gas activities at Norman Wells, NWT (Reinscribing Indigenous Lives and Homelands in a Canadian Energy Landscape: Writing New Histories of Petroleum Extraction at Norman Wells) and which is part of a larger project by the SRRB entitled A Century of Petroleum Extraction at Tłegǫ́hłı̨ (Norman Wells): Indigenous Knowledge for Indigenous Guardianship. I am also very much interested in transdisciplinary research (TDR) and involved in an initiative which assesses the role for sustainable, equitable, cost-effective and rapidly deployable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies in meeting Canada’s net-zero targets (CanCO2Re).

As the co-convenor of the Energy In Society working group at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities (CIH) I am interested in examining how societies have made sense of energy in their everyday lives as well as part of a larger polity and in understanding energy transitions and energy systems as inherently social, i.e. tied to and embedded within other social practice. I am particularly interested in individual energy stories and especially those of women.