Cara New Daggett is a writer and scholar with an interest in the politics of energy and the environment, feminist approaches to science and technology, and histories of empire. Since 2017, she has been a faculty member of the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, where she is now an associate professor.

Her book, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke, 2019), was awarded the Clay Morgan Award for best book in environmental political theory and the Yale H. Ferguson Book Award from the International Association Northeast and has been translated into multiple languages.

Her work has been published in journals including Environmental Politics, Energy Research & Social Science, Millennium: Journal of International Studies and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. She has also enjoyed public-facing writing, podcasting, and engagements with artists and architects around questions of energy - especially how human and nonhuman activities are organized and valued as energy.