Professor Mar Rubio-Varas

Mar Rubio-Varas received her degree in Economics from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and her PhD from the London School of Economics. She subsequently held a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, and later joined the Department of Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She is currently Professor of Economic History at the Public University of Navarre (UPNA), where she is also a researcher at INARBE (Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics). She serves as a Trustee of the European Historical Economics Society.

Her research sits at the intersection of energy history, natural resources, and long-run economic development. She has led major collaborative projects reconstructing historical energy consumption across Europe and Latin America, producing datasets that have become important resources for research on economic growth and energy transitions. She has also pioneered the business history of nuclear energy programmes in Southern Europe, an understudied dimension of twentieth-century industrial and political history. Earlier work reconstructed environmental national accounts for oil-producing economies, contributing to scholarship on the measurement of genuine economic sustainability in resource-dependent countries.

Her current research examines the emergence of the modern renewable energy industry, focusing on Spain and, in particular, Navarre during the final decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on business archives, policy records, and oral history, the project explores how a peripheral European region became a leading centre for wind energy innovation and what this experience reveals about the interaction between public institutions, private enterprise, and local social coalitions in processes of technological and economic change.

More broadly, her work seeks to place contemporary energy transitions in historical perspective and to understand the long-term relationships between energy systems, economic development, and environmental change.