research. teach. engage.
Historian of science and technology at Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, writing on Soviet petroleum geology and nuclear power plant licensing in the American South.
MoreContainment building, Shearon Harris Unit 1, New Hill, N.C. Photo by the author, January 2025.
Ask how states, firms, and the experts who served them (geologists, engineers, and regulators) have made and unmade energy abundance and scarcity, from petroleum exploration in the Russian Empire and Soviet Bloc to nuclear licensing in the American South.
Research →Draw students from engineering, the natural sciences, and public policy into the history of science and technology through the coal, oil, and atoms they already study, in hands-on, team-based courses from the first year through graduate school.
Teaching →Partner with community institutions on public-facing history, most recently recovering the lives of enslaved workers at Raleigh's Yates Mill with Duke undergraduates, and bring energy history to audiences on the radio and at symposia.
Community Engagement →I am a historian of science and technology whose research spans petroleum exploration from the late Russian Empire through the Soviet Bloc and nuclear power plant licensing in the American South since the 1950s. Across both settings, I ask how states, firms, and the experts who served them have made and unmade material energy abundance and scarcity amid political, social, and technological upheaval.
How did Russian oil go from fueling the world's first petroleum-fired railroads in the Age of Steam to trailing coal in the Age of Diesel? The book follows a cohort of Russian and Soviet petroleum geologists and engineers who tried to reconcile illiberal, largely non-market regimes with the demands of exploiting a supergiant reservoir in Tatarstan: from a foreign-owned concern of the 1860s, through a contested theory of petroleum formation in the 1920s, to the Cold War–era Druzhba ("Friendship") pipeline, which bound Tatarstan to Eastern Europe.
It extends large-technical-systems and infrastructure studies to a socialist network whose arteries still trace the contours of the former Soviet Bloc, contributes to envirotech and the business history of technology, and recovers Soviet petroleum geology as a case of earth science made a project of the state. Based on archival research in Moscow, Kazan, Almetyevsk, Prague, and Brno; book proposal anticipated April 2027.
Drawn from the book's first chapter, this article returns to economist Robert Campbell's 1968 question of why Soviet prospectors took until 1948 to find Tatarstan's supergiant Romashkino oilfield. I argue that the delay reflected neither planners' inflexibility nor institutional failure, but a deliberately institutionalized principle, "predictability above all," which a 1920s debate among Soviet petroleum geologists helped entrench, steering the economy toward coal. For submission to Technology and Culture, December 2026; presented at the Business History Conference, the World Congress of Business History, the American Historical Association, and the Hagley Museum and Library.
My second book carries these questions into the American South and from the first nuclear era into the second. It centers on the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant in New Hill, North Carolina (pictured above), a station licensed for four units but built as one. Working from federal licensing dockets and North Carolina archives, I ask how regulators, utilities, and nearby communities negotiated risk, expertise, and public participation.
With Brooke Guthrie and Carson Holloway, I lead a Duke Bass Connections team that critically reexamines nuclear power as a cornerstone of low-carbon electricity in North Carolina, where nuclear plants supply almost a third of in-state generation.
Now in its third year, the undergraduate–graduate team pairs archival research with close reading of Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing dockets to produce a three-part Nicholas Institute report series: a history of commercial nuclear power in the Carolinas, followed by case studies of Duke Energy's 2013 Combined License application for Shearon Harris and its 2025 Early Site Permit application for Belews Creek.
A comparative look at how institutions shaped the design of Cold War nuclear technologies, first presented as an invited panel paper at The Atomic Now: Aesthetics and Technopolitics in the Nuclear Age at Duke in March 2026.
As team leader with Duke's Energy Initiative, I guided student research on naturally occurring radium in Central Texas groundwater and its consequences for public health and regulation.
As an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education Fellow, I joined the team investigating U.S. Public Health Service experiments in Guatemala in the late 1940s. I built the team's onsite archive, analyzed historical documents, and drafted sections of the Commission's two final reports, which were presented to President Barack Obama in 2011.
My research shapes my teaching, drawing engineering and science students into history through the coal, oil, and atoms they already study. My courses are collaborative, case-based, and global in scope, and three principles run through all of them.
Statistics, photographs, maps, engineering schematics, and texts all feed a good history. Learning to synthesize such varied sources builds a creative mindset that no smart machine can match.
The past persists on our campus and in the ground beneath our feet. Hands-on lessons put students in contact with fire, steam, coal, slag, and oil, showing a discipline that is as much tactile as textual.
Most lasting achievements, including whole industries, can't be traced to any one person. Much of every course I teach is devoted to the practice of teamwork.
Student rating of instruction (Duke average: 4.21)
Students who nominated me for a teaching award
Active learning recorded in every five-minute interval by peer observers in chemistry and electrical engineering
"An exemplary educator who clearly cares deeply for his students."
A FOCUS seminar for first-year students that traces human energy use and technology from the domestication of fire through steam power to the splitting of the atom, with a focus on Eurasia and North America and Russia's pioneering transition from coal to oil as its point of departure.
Cover: Tvo. Br. Nobel poster, 1896, Russian State Library.
A yearlong Bass Connections team of undergraduate and graduate students who pair archival research with NRC licensing dockets to write a three-part public-facing report series on the Shearon Harris and Belews Creek sites. Co-led with Brooke Guthrie and Carson Holloway.
Cover: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Shearon Harris site map, 1974.
The opening course of the new CURRENT capstone sequence for the Energy & the Environment Certificate, supported by Duke's Undergraduate Program Enhancement Fund. Student teams act as contractor-consultants on yearlong improvement projects with Duke Utilities & Engineering Services. Co-taught with Rebecca Simmons and Nicole Vijgen.
Cover: Bill Bradbury, The DukEngineer, February 1951.
Two introductory surveys built from courses I already teach to non-majors, plus upper-division and graduate offerings.
Adapted from History of Energy Use and Power Generation, the course follows technology from fire to fission through source substitution, collective invention, and technological hybridization. Designed for non-majors and aligned with ABET outcomes for engineering majors.
Through thermodynamics, geology and deep time, and nuclear fission, the course asks how laboratories, field surveys, and states produced and certified knowledge about nature.
| Course | Institution | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| History of Energy Use and Power Generation Now | Duke | Fall 2020–2026 |
| Reexamining Nuclear Power in the Carolinas and Beyond Now | Duke | Fall 2024–Spring 2027 |
| Energy and the Environment Capstone I: Bootcamp Now | Duke | Fall 2026 |
| History+: Impounded Water, Impounded Lives | Duke | Summer 2026 |
| Nuclear Energy & Society | Duke | Fall 2025 |
| Energy & Society | Duke | Spring 2021–2025 |
| Energy & Environment: Design & Innovation | Duke | Spring 2024, Spring 2025, Fall 2025 |
| Modern Regulatory State | Duke | Spring 2020, 2022, 2024 |
| Environment, Energy, Climate Change | Duke | Fall 2021 |
| Extractive Economies | Duke | Fall 2018 |
| History of European Capitalism | Elon University | Winter 2020 |
Energy decisions are made in public, and the histories behind them belong to the public too. I work with community partners, listeners, and audiences across North Carolina to bring that history into view.
With Robert Buerglener and Carson Holloway, I co-directed this eight-week History+ summer research program. Five Duke undergraduates, mentored by graduate project manager Jade Marcum, worked with Historic Yates Mill County Park in Raleigh to recover the history of the enslaved millers, millwrights, and laborers who powered the mill in the century before emancipation, people whose presence has long gone unacknowledged in the park's interpretation.
Working from wills, bills of sale, court records, and newspaper advertisements at the State Archives of North Carolina and Duke's Rubenstein Library, and holding to an "almost certainly" standard of proof, the team produced materials designed as lasting resources for the park's research, education, and public programming:
Duke's Department of History is now funding a public exhibit of the students' work at the park.
On Charlotte Talks with Mike Collins, I joined Matt Wald of the Breakthrough Institute and Sue Sturgis of the Energy and Policy Institute for an hour on the history and future of nuclear power in North Carolina: whether surging electricity demand from AI data centers will bring nuclear power back to the Southeast, and why the region's history of costly project failures still shapes the debate.
Listen to the episode →Invited panelist at a Duke humanities symposium with keynotes by Michaël Ferrier and Hikaru Fujii, presenting "Styles of the Atom: Institutions and the Making of Cold War Nuclear Technologies."
Volunteer tour guide at the park since 2023, and a member of the Board of Directors of Yates Mill Associates from 2024 to 2026, serving as Vice President in 2025.
Published, forthcoming, and in-progress work. A writing sample is available on request.
Lecturing Fellow and Associate Director of Education & Experiential Learning
tom.cinq.mars@duke.edu