Jessica M. Smith

Jessica M. Smith is Dean’s fellow of earth and society programs and professor in the department of engineering, design and society at the Colorado School of Mines. She speaks and publishes widely on energy transition, blue-collar work, and corporate accountability. Smith is the author of two books and more than 70 peer-reviewed publications. Her book Extracting Accountability: Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility (MIT Press, 2021) was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and her first book, Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West (Rutgers University Press, 2014), was funded by the NSF and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was named a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences in 2022 and held a British Academy International Visiting Fellowship at the University of St. Andrews in 2018. Her recent research on carbon capture and storage has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Department of Energy. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Engineering Studies and as a member of the National Academies’ Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan and a BA from Macalester College.

Smith’s project, “Rage and Recovery: Navigating Polarization in the (Other) Coal Country,” investigates how the ongoing energy transition both reinforces and reworks a longer history of politicized rural-urban divides in the United States. By comparing how the coal downturn is experienced by communities in Wyoming and Colorado, she aims to intervene in dominant portrayals of the politics of blue-collar Americans and to attend to how they are rebuilding civic life as they build more ethical energy futures.