I am a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. My research is situated at the intersection of political economy, political ecology, comparative historical sociology, STS, and labor. My current project examines the historical dynamics of energy transitions, specifically focusing on the transnational shift from thermal to hydroelectric power during the interwar period. By investigating this transition through the case of colonial Manchukuo, this project argues that the state utilized energy infrastructure as a recombinatory tool to transform heterogeneous energy sources into a legible unit of abstraction, thereby serving state productivism and industrial war-making. My future dissertation project plans to continue on this theme and move into the history of energy in the People’s Republic of China. I seek to analyze the transition from state socialism to capitalism to understand how China emerges as the world’s largest carbon economy.