Melina Antonia Buns 

is associate professor of history at the University of Stavanger, Norway, and part of the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities. Her research interests lie at the intersection of environmental, energy, and international history. She is an expert of the history of Nordic environmental cooperation and specializes in the history of nuclear waste and energy humanities. She leads the international collaborative research project Energy Lives! Infrastructural Citizenship in Nordic Energy Transitions, funded by NordForsk, which scrutinizes the conjoined lives of energy and people in the Nordic countries over the past 150 years. 

Energy has its own life: it is harvested, transported, used, and wasted. Yet energy also comes to life through encounters with it: it is lived through people, politics, and places. While some energy historians criticise the term energy transition as it fails to recognise the addition of energy fuels and overall accumulation of energy throughout history rather than a replacement and decline, the introduction of electricity and new fuels has nevertheless altered and shaped environments and everyday lives through infrastructure and appliances, norms and expectation, acceptance and rejection. Focusing on the Nordic region, the international research project Energy Lives! scrutinises the conjoined lives of energy and people over the past 150 years. It seeks to understand how publics and communities have emerged around ways of living with and through energy transitions and how such publics have shaped and constrained energy transitions over long time periods. This emphasis asks us as historians to attune to the lived experiences and the encounters with energy historically. This talk will share experiences from the research in this collaborative project on accessing such historical encounters with energy and energy transitions. It will also share reflections from my own research on a former uranium mine in Sweden and invite to an informal conversation on methods for the energy humanities. 

Plakat zum Montagskolloquium im Sommersemester 2026