Petra Dolata is associate professor and former Canada research chair in the history of energy at the University of Calgary, Canada. She is the scholar in residence (2018–2023) at the interdisciplinary Calgary Institute for the Humanities, where she also co-convenes the Energy In Society (EIS) research group. She holds a master’s degree in American studies from Ruhr University Bochum, where she also received her PhD in international relations with a study on US-German energy relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her current research focuses on European and North American energy history after 1945 as well as the history and politics of energy transitions. She is part of a seven-year partnership project, funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, on deindustrialization and the politics of our time (2020–2027). The project is based at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University and examines the historical roots and lived experience of deindustrialization as well as the political responses to it.

Petra was the 2022 Rachel Carson Simone Veil Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center and Project House Europe, LMU Munich.