Diana J. Montaño's teaching and research interests broadly include the construction of modern Latin American societies with a focus on technology and its relationship to nationalism, everyday life and domesticity.
Her first book, Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City, examines how capitalinos (Mexico City’s residents) shaped their spaces’ electrification from the 1880s to the 1960s. It captures their fluid and textured relationship to electricity in all its complexity by following how ordinary citizens (from businesspeople, inventors, doctors, to homemakers, and electrical workers) used electricity symbolically and physically in constructing a modern nation. It shows how these “electrifying agents” crafted a discourse for an electrified future and shaped how electricity was lived, consumed, rejected, and even stolen in everyday life.
Electrifying Mexico received the 2023 Bolton-Johnson Prize for best book in English on Latin American History, the 2023 International Committee for the History of Technology Turriano Prize, the Urban History Association (UHA) prize for the best book in non-North American urban history for 2022, and the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies’ 2022 Alfred B. Thomas Award for the best book on a Latin American subject. In 2023, the book earned an Honorable Mention for the Best Book in the Humanities from the Latin American Studies Association and was a finalist for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) William & Joyce Middleton Electrical Engineering History Award. Issues in Science and Technology published an excerpt from the book and responses to her work.
Her work has appeared in History of Technology, Technology's Stories, the Hispanic American Historical Review, and Technology and Culture. Her article “Ladrones de Luz: Policing Electricity in Mexico City, 1901-1918” on power theft, published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, received the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) Article Prize for Emerging Scholar, The Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize, and the 2023 History of Science Society (HSS) Forum for Science and Knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean (SKLAC) Article Prize as well as Honorable Mention from SECOLAS and the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) for Best Article in the Social Sciences.
Prof. Montaño is a former fellow at the Linda Hall Library, where she researched for her second book project, “Necaxa and the Engineering of a Mexican Energy Landscape,” which explores the transnational networks of capital, expertise, machinery, and labor that contributed to the construction of the Necaxa hydroelectric complex, to reassess the role of hydropower in Mexico and the reengineering of nature in constructing a new energy landscape at the dawn of the twentieth century. In doing so, it traces the histories of towns, indigenous workers, and water bodies that were displaced—both by force and voluntarily—and how certain everyday native technologies and techniques remain uncredited.
She is coordinating the edited volume Latin American Technocultural Worlds: Histories of Design, Aesthetics, and Practice on aesthetics of technology in Latin America with Assoc. Prof. Yovanna Pineda (University of Central Florida) and Assoc. Prof. Mikael Wolfe (Stanford University). The volume challenges our understanding of Latin Americans’ technological lives by recentering scholarly inquiry affirming that technological innovation, craftsmanship, design, and adaptation have been a constant of everyday life in Latin America. It foregrounds questions about what technology is, who creates it, and how it shapes lives and spaces. It pushes the field in meaningful directions to engage more deeply with the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and gender.
She is co-editor of the University of Nebraska Press’ book series Confluencias on Mexican history. She also convenes the Working Group: History of Science, Technology & Medicine in Latin America.
Prof. Montaño is not taking graduate students for Fall 2027 entry.
