1 January 2026

Photo: Cara Daggett

Cara New Daggett is a political philosopher whose research explores energy and ecological politics through an intersectional feminist framework. She is an affiliate faculty member in political science at Virginia Tech, where she was an associate professor before moving to Germany. Between 2023 and 2025, she was a senior fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam. She is particularly focused upon interrogating global North attachments to productivity and intensive energy use, and more recently, on envisioning what feminist energy systems could look like. Her award-winning book, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work, has been translated into multiple languages, as have several of her articles. As a co-editor of the Critical Energy Studies book series at MIT Press, she is committed to supporting the growing field of social and humanistic approaches to energy. In addition to academic research, Daggett has also enjoyed public-facing writing, podcasting, and engagements with artists and architects around questions of energy –

A warm welcome to the Centre, Cara!