Trish Kahle is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University in Qatar whose research uses energy as a lens through which to study political life, social relations, the economy, and the environment, with a focus on the modern United States and the world.
Professor Kahle’s first book, Energy Citizenship: Coal and Democracy in the American Century (Columbia University Press, 2024), traces how modern U.S. citizenship has been shaped by coal miners and the fuel they extracted. The book demonstrates how Appalachian coal miners left an indelible mark on the energy system of the United States, its political imagination, and its practices of governance and shows how the politics of energy is fundamentally a mediation of energy violence, one which demands further interrogation of the relationship between energy and democracy. Energy Citizenship was awarded the Merle Curti Social History Award by the Organization of American Historians and was a finalist for the Hagley Prize in Business History from the Business History Conference.
Kahle’s second book project Everywhere, Invisible: The Global History of American Electric Power rewrites the history of electric power systems in U.S. history by foregrounding the intertwined histories of American imperialism and electric power systems.
At GU-Q, Kahle is the co-lead of the Energy Humanities Research Initiative with the support of the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS), which produced a special issue on “Affects of Energy Transition” in Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture. The next special issue, “Decolonizing Energy,” will appear in South Atlantic Quarterly in January 2027. CIRS also supported Kahle’s curation of the project, Cinematic Afterlives: Film and Memory in the Black Atlantic.
Professor Kahle completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago.