Rate My Professor Simone Abram

Professor Simone Abram is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University. She serves as Executive Director of the Durham Energy Institute and holds the Ørsted Chair of Green Energy Systems. She completed her PhD in 1994, with early doctoral research on how people imagine the persistence of the past under conditions of economic decline. Her work addresses questions of change and time, focusing on the urgency of decarbonising energy systems to combat climate change. Abram examines the time horizons involved, inequalities and injustices perpetuated during system transformations, and diverse future imaginaries, including technical modelling, formal planning, and informal reflections. Her ethnographic research is based in Western Europe—primarily the UK, France, and Scandinavia—and she engages in interdisciplinary collaborations with engineers, scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, sociologists, and geographers. She founded the Energy Anthropology Network and participates in the Energy Futures Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the Fair Transitions Consortium.

Abram was Visiting Professor at the University of Bergen in 2017 and at the University of Paris 8 (Saint Denis) and LAVUE in 2013. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2017. Notable publications include 'Problem solving as selective blindness' in Critique of Anthropology (2024); 'Just Transition: A whole-systems approach to decarbonisation' in Climate Policy (2022); 'Electricity as a Field for Anthropological Theorising and Research' (2022); 'Promises of the past: transformations, transitions and traditions' (2023); and the co-edited Green Ice: Tourism Ecologies in the European High North (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Current projects encompass INCLUDE for socially-inclusive energy transitions, GEMS on geothermal energy from mines, ICHP on zero-carbon networks, REHIP for Teesside’s hydrogen economy, and ELEXIA for digitised energy integration. She served as Secretary to the organising committee of the World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Societies (2013) and Honorary Secretary of the Association of Social Anthropologists (2005-2010), and is a founding editor of ASAonline.