Diana Montaño (Washington University in St. Louis), “Necaxa, Revolution & the Nature of a Changing Climate” (Agrarian Studies Colloquium)

Event time: 
Friday, November 4, 2022 - 11:00am
Location: 
Zoom and 230 Prospect Street, Room 101 See map
Event description: 
Diana J. Montaño is Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Her teaching and research interests broadly include the construction of modern Latin American societies focusing on technology and its relationship to nationalism, everyday life, and domesticity. Her book Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City looks at how “electrifying agents” (businessmen, salespersons, inventors, doctors, housewives, maids, and domestic advisors) used electricity, both symbolically and physically, in the construction of a modern city, self, and the other. Taking a user-based perspective, Dr. Montaño reconstructs how electricity was lived, consumed, rejected, and shaped in everyday life. Electrifying Mexico received the Urban History Association (UHA) prize for the best book in non-North American urban history for 2022 and the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies’ Alfred B. Thomas Award for the best book on a Latin American subject. 
 
Her work has appeared in History of Technology, Technology’s Stories and the Hispanic American Historical Review. Her article “Ladrones de Luz: Policing Electricity in Mexico City, 1901-1918” on power theft published in the Hispanic American Historical Review received the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies’ (CALACS) Article Prize for Emerging Scholar, The Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize, (administered by the Society for the History of Technology – SHOT- and awarded annually to the best paper in the history of electrotechnology—power, electronics, telecommunications, and computer science), as well as Honorable Mention from SECOLAS and from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) for Best Article in the Social Sciences. She is co-editor of the University of Nebraska Press’ book series Confluencias on Mexican history.
 
About the Agrarian Studies Program
The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.
 
This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.
 
It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
 
Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time, unless otherwise noted.
 
Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.
 
Please contact agrarian.studies@yale.edu to receive the meeting information and the password to download the paper from the Agrarian Studies website.
Admission: 
Free but register in advance
Open to: 
Yale Community Only