Energy Technologies, Development, and the Environment in Modern Iran, 1935-2005

FAIN: DOI-293761-23

University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)
Ciruce Alexander Movahedi-Lankarani (Project Director: February 2023 to present)

Research and writing leading to a scholarly monograph about the modern history of the use of natural gas in Iran. 

This project focuses on the history natural gas in 20th-century Iran, using the energy source—as both a varied material substance and an object of discourse—as a lens to study the country’s developmental programs, its charged politics of modernization, and their connection to the natural world. It follows the movement of gas from underground reservoirs through infrastructures of refining and distribution into everyday life, in the process exploring the roles of planners, oil firms, industrialists, consumers, mountain ranges, sedimentary rock, and natural gas itself. Drawing upon perspectives from Middle Eastern history, science and technology studies, and political ecology, it contributes to our knowledge of modern Iran, the creation of fossil fuel energy systems in the Global South, the role of anticolonial politics in the rise of hydrocarbon energy regimes and the climate crises they have spawned, and the theorization of precarity as an entrepot to studying human-nature interactions.