On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-Western settings, specializing in the history of energy and the climate crisis. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, and the author of three books: Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (2020), On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (2013), and Names Without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic Chat-Room (2006). Prior to joining Tel Aviv University, On was a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows and a lecturer at the history department at Princeton University. In 2009, he received a joint PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from New York University. He also holds an MA in Islamic Studies from Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Joint LLB and BA in Law and Arabic Language & Literature from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
