Staff profile

ESRC-funded PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and PhD Fellow at the Durham Energy Institute. Prior to joining Durham University, I received a BSc in Science, Technology and International Affairs from Georgetown University, in the USA. I also hold a MA in Research Methods from Durham University, which was sponsored through 1+3 ESRC funding.

Current Research Project

In my current research, I am exploring reconfigurations of the power system and its regulation in Italy as case studies for the sociomaterial assembling of sustainable transitions. Specifically, I follow the proliferation of ditributed generation technologies and of regional and national legislation on shared prosumption to think about how human and more-than-human agents contribute to changing governance structures and imaginaries of both sovereignty and the future of the energy system.

The project branches into three arguments explored in separate papers:

1) In Power Disruptions, I trace how changes in electricity infrastructures in Italy change relations of proximity embedded in the power system and simultaneously stabilise and de-stabilise the assemblage of the state through lines of de/re-territorialisation and de/coding.

2) In Assembling Renewable Energy Communities, I make use of diffractive analysis to show how change in the country’s energy governance emerges in relation not only with the ideological wants of those in government but also with the processes of iterative materialisations that make up the energy landscape. 

And

3) in Mapping the Conjuncture for Change, I think through the polychronic temporalities of transitions to argue that reframings of desired futures emerge in entanglement with agentic publics and materialities whose provisional relevance and affordances influence the creation of “critical junctures” in time where certain pasts are put aside in favour of new futures. 

The research focuses on Italy because of the country's hybrid regionalism, its significant share of decentralised electricity generation, and recent legislation to allow and incentivise shared prosumption. It aims not only to present empirical research on energy transitions in the country but also to reflect on the significance of decentralising agency in studies of change. 

• Geographies of Energy
• Political Ecology
• Material Politics