I am a human geographer with a background in physics and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Urban Studies at Temple University. I received my Ph.D. in Energy and Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Barbara. My Ph.D. dissertation investigated the presumptions and precarity embedded in contemporary electricity systems by applying critical social theory, social science research methods, and electric power systems monitoring. Motivated by my PhD work, I began researching the build-out of electric grids under various political and economic regimes (mainly of the US, Ghana, and Tanzania), to explore the relationship between nation-state building and capitalist investment on so-called reliable and unreliable electric systems. My long-term goal is to construct a historicized account of the differences in power, reliability, and responsibility within infrastructure services of the Global North and Global South. My research is supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER award and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more on my research program visit https://www.energygeographies.com/.

Currently, I’m working on a book titled “Hooked: Electrification and the Making of the Consumer,” forthcoming from MIT Press. The book is a history of post-Reconstruction America told through the grid, with a special focus on the West Coast and the Pacific Northwest. It makes the case for studying the history of electrical reliance over the longue durée, while focusing on the ordinary consumer(s) and worker(s) as central characters in the development of large socio-technical infrastructure. Thinking both regionally and through the grid’s larger interconnections, the project follows actors and networks caught up together amid evolving industry debates and practices. Using archives of the BPA (the federal organization in charge of transmission), Seattle City Light (a customer of the BPA, and a municipal utility serving Seattle residents), and Pacific Gas & Electric (the investor-owned utility serving Northern and Central California), the project provides a story of electrification within broader changes in the political economy and regulatory milieus that shaped growing electrical power (from large-scale transmission systems down to distribution levels and household wiring). In doing so, the book explores the history of the physical grid (e.g., voltage and frequency fluctuations and standardization, and everyday outages, intermittency, and disconnections) alongside the actors and actions it mediated and through which it’s been mediated. The book documents American consumer subjects not as mere “load” or potential “demand” in need of “building up,” but rather as people with power and leverage that produced fundamental changes within the histories of their infrastructure services.

I am also an artist and a ceramicist. I use visual art to express the complexities of my research, showing through sculpting and deconstructing thrown forms the poetic nature of infrastructure. “Art and Soul” in Dispatches Magazine is a personal story on my art and the work of pricing it. And Electric Visions and Infrastructural Beings are curated film series I put together that use animation, fiction, documentary, and experimental films to showcase the infrastructurally charged experiences of our physical and social world.

Selected Publications

  1. Salma Elmallah and Veronica Jacome. “Essentially Indebted: Utilities, Regulation, and the Politics of Protection and Vulnerability.” Antipode 58, no. 6 (2026): e70214. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70214

  2. Veronica Jacome, Isha Ray, Pius Siakwah, and Eric Lawyer. “The Symbolic Violence of Debt Discourse: Protesting Electricity Bills in Kroboland, Ghana.” Energy Research & Social Science 131 (2026): 104534. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2026.104534

  3. Jessica Kersey, Civian Kiki Massa, June Lukuyu, Judith Mbabazi, Jay Taneja, Daniel M. Kammen, and Veronica Jacome. “Grid Connections and Inequitable Access to Electricity in African Cities.” Nature Cities 2, no. 5 (2025): 413–421. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00221-1

  4. Cristina Crespo Montañés, Isha Ray, and Veronica Jacome. “Out of Sight, Out of Mind? How Electricity (Un)reliability Shapes Residential Energy Transitions.” Applied Energy 385 (2025): 125497. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2025.125497

  5. Veronica Jacome. “‘Killing Complaints with Courtesy’: The Role of Relationship Building in the Success of the Early U.S. Central Power Stations (1890–1938).” Enterprise & Society (2024): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2024.11

  6. Sage Kime, Veronica Jacome, David Pellow, and Ranjit Deshmukh. “Evaluating Equity and Justice in Low-Carbon Energy Transitions.” Environmental Research Letters 18, no. 12 (2023): 123003. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad08f8

  7. Veronica Jacome. “Limits of Energy Access Research on Unreliability.” Journal of International Development 35, no. 8 (2023): 2626–2644. https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.3790

  8. Veronica Jacome, Noah Klugman, Belinda Grunfeld, Catherine Wolfram, Duncan Callaway, and Isha Ray. “Power Quality and Modern Energy for All.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 33 (2019): 16308–16313. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1903610116

  9. Veronica Jacome and Isha Ray. “The Prepaid Electric Meter: Rights, Relationships and Reification in Unguja, Tanzania.” World Development 105 (2018): 262–272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.01.007

Selected Grants

  1. National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Tracing Cultural Histories and Socio-Technical Dynamics of Uneven Power Grids (2024–2029). Principal Investigator.

  2. Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, History of Science. Powering Reliable Connections: From Historical Insights to Collaborative Research in Electric Power Systems (2024–2027). Principal Investigator.

  3. Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, History of Science. Shadow Grids: Gas, Fuel Deliveries, and Back-up Fossil-Fueled Generation in an Electrifying U.S. (2026–2028). Co-Investigator.

  4. Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Energy and Environment. Expanding and Diversifying Energy Data to Support a Just Transition (2023–2026). Co-Investigator.

Research and Teaching Interests

Energy Geographies, History of Electric Power Systems, Science and Technology Studies, Infrastructure Studies, Political Economy of Energy Development, Postcolonial Studies, Oral History, Infrastructure Poetics and Aesthetic Theory, Electric Power Systems and Physics