Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on September 22, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the European Institute for a book talk by Daniela Russ. Yana Skorobogatov (Harriman Institute) and Alyssa Battistoni (Barnard Political Science) will serve as discussants.
In Working Nature, Daniela Russ offers a history of the energy economy and its representations over the 19th and 20th century. Drawing on Aleksandr Bogdanov and Theodor Adorno, Russ argues that “energy” is neither a thing nor an idea, but a social relation to nature forged in capitalist industrialisation. The concept of energy mediates the appropriation of diverse natural forces – water, steam, coal, electricity – altering the way these forces would naturally behave to perform work in production. From the valuation of coal and crafting of the current to the formalization of the substitution of energy commodities, it asks how engineers, scientists and economists achieved the production and circulation of nature’s work against social and natural resistance. In so doing, they undermined the very purpose of the energy economy – to emancipate humanity from nature.
Daniela Russ is a historical sociologist based at the Global and European Studies Institute of the University of Leipzig, Germany. Her research explores the history of the energy economy in a global perspective, the conflicts around the expansion and decarbonization of the electric grid, and the theory and practice of Soviet energy planning. Her work has been published by outlets such as Contemporary European History, Verso Books and Stanford University Press.
