Petrocultures members engage with oil, energy, and climate issues using the tools of the fine arts, arts, humanities, and social sciences. We are researchers, artists, and activists who study the past, present, and future of energy to create a more just and sustainable world.
If you would like to become a member, submit your short application. You will be asked to describe how your work fits with our mandate.
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Raquel Abend
Raquel Abend van Dalen holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing in Spanish and Art History from the University of Houston. Her scholarly research revolves around twentieth-century Venezuelan petrofiction, new materialisms, and gender violence. She is the author of two novels, one collection of short stories, and three collections of poetry. Currently, Abend van Dalen is working on a dystopic oil novel set in Venezuela in the 1990s.

Philip Aghoghovwia
Philip Aghoghovwia taught English and Cultural Studies in South Africa, prior to relocating to Canada in 2022. His research is in environmental humanities, African literature, oil and water studies, and the cultures and politics of resource extraction in Africa. He is a fellow/awardee of the African Humanities Program of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and African Studies Association, and the South African Department of Higher Education Future Professor Programme. Aghoghovwia holds a research rating of Y1 by the National Research Foundation (South Africa). His most recent essays appeared in the South African Journal of Science (2021), Safundi (2021), Social Dynamics (2022), and Interventions (2022). He is the author of Violent Ecotropes: Petroculture in the Niger Delta (HSRC Press, 2022).

Gretchen Bakke
Gretchen Bakke holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Cultural Anthropology. Her work focuses on the chaos and creativity that emerge during social, cultural, and technological transitions. She is currently a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin. Bakke is the author of The Grid, a 2016 Bill Gates pick, and the 2020 ethnography The Likeness. She is currently conducting research for a cultural history of the end of fossil fuels.

Stacey Balkan
Stacey Balkan is Associate Professor of Environmental Literature and Humanities at Florida Atlantic University where she also serves as an affiliate faculty member for the university’s Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation. Stacey is the author of Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India (West Virginia University Press, 2022), co-editor, with Dr. Swaralipi Nandi, of Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere (Penn State Press, 2021), and collaborator on the collectively authored work Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022). Recent work also appears in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Revue Études Anglaises, Energy Humanities, The Global South, Global South Studies, Mediations, Public Books, Social Text Online, and several forthcoming volumes including Energized: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy and Environment. More information about Stacey’s work can be found at www.staceybalkan.com.

Darin Barney
Darin Barney is the Grierson Chair in Communication Studies and Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. From 2005-2015 he was Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship at McGill. He was President of the Canadian Communication Association (2010-2012), and served on the Advisory Council of the Law Commission of Canada (2000-2005). He has received several awards for his academic work, including the 2003 SSHRC Aurora Prize for outstanding contribution to Canadian intellectual life. He is a member of the After Oil collective and a Director of the Radical Critical Theory Circle. He convenes the Grierson Research Group (www.griersonresearchgroup.ca).

Brent Ryan Bellamy
Brent Ryan Bellamy teaches university courses on critical world building, science fiction studies, and energy humanities. His book Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of US Decline is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. He has co-edited Materialism and the Critique of Energy (2018) with Jeff Diamanti and An Ecotopian Lexicon (2019) with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson. More information available at brentryanbellamy.com. (photo credit: Gange Photo)

Dominic Boyer
Dominic Boyer teaches at Rice University, where he also served as Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (2013-2019). He is currently pursuing anthropological research with flood victims in Houston, Texas, and on electric futures across the world. His most recent book is Energopolitics (Duke UP, 2019), which is part of a collaborative duograph, “Wind and Power in the Anthropocene,” with Cymene Howe. With Howe, he also helped make a documentary film about Iceland’s first major glacier (Okjökull) lost to climate change, Not Ok: a little movie about a small glacier at the end of the world (2018). In August 2019, together with Icelandic collaborators they installed a memorial to Okjökull’s passing, an event that attracted media attention from around the world.

Frédéric Caille
Frédéric Caille is a teacher and researcher in Political Science at the University Savoie Mont Blanc and the Laboratory Triangle ENS-Lyon. He works on the socio-history of solar energy and how it can contribute to raising awareness of renewable energy issues. He has just published (2023) the first biography of the world’s first innovator in the field of solar energy, Augustin Mouchot (1825-1912), and is working on the English translation: L’invention de l’énergie solaire. La véritable histoire d’Augustin Mouchot (The Invention of Solar Energy. TheTrue Story of Augustin Mouchot). He also worked in Africa on the traces of the first thermodynamic solar pumps installed in the 1970s by a French company and collectively produced a model for the energy gallery of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. He hosts a scientific blog on this work: https://afrisol.hypotheses.org/. He also published and presented the first articles translated into French of Indian renewable energy pioneer Amulya K. N Reddy (Penser les énergies depuis les Suds, Quebec, esbc, 2022). A list of publications can be found here: https://triangle.ens-lyon.fr/spip.php?article4283.

Adam Carlson
Adam Carlson teaches at the University of Alberta in the department of English and Film Studies and at the French-language Campus Saint-Jean. His research focuses on the cultural politics of infrastructure and intellectual production in settler-colonial extractive economies. He is co-editor of Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture (2017), which has just entered its second printing from McGill-Queens University Press; he is also a contributor to After Oil (West Virginia University Press, 2016). His forthcoming work will appear in Canadian Literature, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Literature, and Science, Technology and Human Values.

Pragnya Parimita Chayani
Pragnya Parimita Chayani holds a Ph.D. in English (2023) from Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad (IITDh), India. Her thesis concentrates on Petrofiction. Previously, she has finished her M.Phil. (2017) on Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy from University of Hyderabad. She is the recipient of James Roach Fellowship (2019) offered by Osmania University, Hyderabad, where she studied Petrocapitalism as evinced in American Literature. Her research interests include Energy Humanities, Diaspora studies, Ecocriticism, and Postcolonialism. Currently, she is an Outreach Fellow at the Global Center of Excellence in Affordable and Clean Energy (GCoE-ACE), IIT Dharwad. While busy working on her monograph, she is working on two papers, on Nigeria and the Gulf region, focussing on oil and culture interrelationships.

Farrukh Chishtie
Farrukh Chishtie (he/him) is an atmospheric, climate, and earth observation scientist with extensive experience in various experimental and modelling disciplines. Holding three Master degrees and two PhDs in Applied Mathematics and Education with specialization in environment and sustainability, he has more than twenty years of research experience. Along with grassroots advocacy on issues of climate change and environmental degradation across the globe, he aims for holistic understanding towards meaningful action. His areas of expertise and active research are climate science and policy, climate adaptation and mitigation via integrating both Earth Sciences and the Science, Technology and Society (STS) lens. Ongoing research efforts include studies of air pollution and health, droughts, floods, landslides, wildfires, storms, and extreme weather events in the Asian and the American regions.

Brigt Dale
Brigt Dale is an anthropologist and political scientist and a Research Director at the Environment and Society Research group at Nordland Research Institute, Norway. His research focuses on extractive industries in the north, climate policy and action, and the politics of oil and post-petroleum trajectories. Current projects focus on socio-ecological tipping points in transformation, the importance of understanding impact chains in climate risk mitigation and planning, and the need for adaptive and transformative action when building sustainable alternative industries in oil-dependent regions, such as the Arctic. More recent interest includes conflicts over land-use and negative ecosystem effects of onshore windmill parks and aquaculture, and new green-tech solutions such as offshore wind, CCUS solutions, hydrogen and ammonia production, and charging- and storage infrastructure. He is currently (2018-2021) an affiliated professor at IBES Brown Institute for Environment and Society, RI, USA. A list of publications can be found here.

Thomas S. Davis
Thomas S. Davis is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty at the Sustainability Institute at The Ohio State University. He is the author of The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life (Columbia UP, 2016). His essays have appeared in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Twentieth Century Literature, Textual Practice, Cultural Dynamics, and several edited volumes. His work on aesthetics and the Bakken oilfields appears in Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), eds. Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun. He is completing his second book, Forming Attachments: Aesthetic Education and Ecological Crisis. He edits the newly launched “Energy and Environment” forum for Modernism/Modernity Print Plus. More information about these projects is available at www.thomassdavis.net

Pauline Destrée
Pauline Destrée is an assistant professor in anthropology at Durham University in the UK, where she teaches a range of environmental anthropology courses. She has a background in material and visual culture studies and a regional interest in West Africa. She was previously a Research Fellow at the Centre for Energy Ethics at the University of St Andrews. Her research is centred around questions of energy politics, environmental inequalities and resource extraction in West Africa. Her current research looks at post-oil environmental and political futures in Ghana, through an ethnography of the oil industry in Takoradi.

Jeff Diamanti
Jeff Diamanti is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities (Cultural Analysis & Philosophy) at the University of Amsterdam. His first monograph, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in June 2021. His work can be found at www.jeffdiamanti.com.

Megan Egler
Megan Egler is a researcher, activist, and doctoral candidate in the department of natural resources at the University of Vermont. Her dissertation research explores the intersection of narrative, identity, and sociotechnical innovation in how energy futures are imagined and enacted within fossil fuel producing regions of Canada and the United States. Megan is a graduate fellow at the Gund Institute for Environment, is an organizing member of DegrowUS, and has worked with several organizations on social justice research, particularly around environmental liabilities in extractive industries. She is a regular collaborator in politically motivated performance art and seeks to infuse care and conviviality into her work and action.

Danine Farquharson
Danine Farquharson is Associate Professor of English at Memorial University. Her early research focused on violence in Irish literature and film but her current interests are in ocean studies and energy humanities, specifically working on a joint research project with Dr. Fiona Polack: Cold Water Oil. Together, they examine how the North Atlantic offshore oil and gas industry is imagined in a wide range of high and popular contexts – everything from social media, to visual art, to literary fiction. She is co-founder and co-curator with Dr. Julia Wright of Dalhousie University of the research cluster and blog: SSHORE (Social Science and Humanities Ocean Research and Education).

Rania Ghosn
Rania Ghosn is Associate Professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding partner of Design Earth with El Hadi Jazairy. She is editor of New Geographies 2: Landscapes of Energy (2010) and co-author of Geographies of Trash (2015) and Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (2018). Ghosn’s scholarly writings chart geographic portraits of energy infrastructure to describe the frictions and unanticipated consequences that inevitably accompany such projects. Chapters have appeared in several edited volumes, including: The Arab City (2016), Energy Accounts: Architectural Representations of Energy, Climate, and the Future (2016); The Camp and the City (2017); and Infrastructure Space (Routledge, 2017). The Design Earth “After Oil” project of is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Derek Gladwin
Derek Gladwin is an Assistant Professor of Language & Literacy Education and a Sustainability Fellow with the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. He has also held visiting fellowships at National University of Ireland, Galway, University of Amsterdam, University of Edinburgh, and Trinity College Dublin. Gladwin is the author or editor of several books focusing on environmental literacy and narrative education in digital, visual, and literary culture, including Ecological Exile (2018), Gastro-Modernism (2019), and Rewriting Our Stories (2021). He is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on energy literacy and storytelling.
Jacob Goessling
Jacob Goessling is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, TN, with a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University. His essay “Seeing Extraction: The Production and Reproduction of Energy Culture” was recently published in Transformations: A Journal of Media, Culture and Technology. Jacob’s research considers the residual cultural presence of extractive infrastructure in regions that have been shaped through resource mining. His teaching explores topics related to environmental and energy justice, place-based composition, and the literature and culture of climate emergency.

Walter Gordon
Walter Gordon is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Public Energy Humanities at Transitions in Energy, Culture, and Society (University of Alberta) and the Petrocultures Research Group. His research is concerned with African American literature, energy, and the environment, particularly in relation to questions of labor. He is currently working on two projects: a digital, interactive adaptation of Shirley Graham’s 1941 play Dust to Earth, and a monograph entitled “Oh, Awful Power”: Energy and Modernity in African American Literature, which tracks the interlinked cultural histories of King Coal and Jim Crow.

Rachel Havrelock
Rachel Havrelock is a Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she directs the UIC Freshwater Lab. Her interest in Petrocultures largely focuses on pipelines, in particular the world’s first transnational oil pipeline that ran from Kirkuk to Haifa and the Enbridge Lakehead System. In addition to academic articles, Rachel has published digitally on the Line 5 pipeline and Chicago River as a manner of pipeline.

Matt Hooley
Matt Hooley is Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Dartmouth College. His book, Against Extraction: Indigenous Modernisms in the Twin Cities, which situates the history of anti-colonial Indigenous writing against reccurent regimes of environmental, cultural, and legal extraction in Minnesota, will be published by Duke University Press in Spring 2024. He is currently at work on two other major projects: (1) a cultural history of the production of drought in the U.S. and occupied Palestine titled Drought: Scenes from a Colonial History, and (2) along with a group Indigenous poets and visual artists, he is a co-editor of a digital humanities project—the Indigenous Annotations Lab—that seeks to reimagine how contemporary Indigenous writing is shared and interpreted.

Cymene Howe
Cymene Howe is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. Her books include Intimate Activism (Duke 2013), The Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon (Punctum 2020) and Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke 2019), which follows human and more-than-human lives intertwined with renewable energy futures. Her current research focuses on adaptation to ice-loss in the Arctic region and sea level rise in coastal cities around the world. She co-produced the documentary film Not Ok: A Little Movie about a Small Glacier at the End of the World and initiated the Okjökull memorial, the world’s first memorial to a glacier felled by climate change.

Rachel Webb Jekanowski
Rachel Webb Jekanowski is an interdisciplinary scholar working between film and media studies and the energy humanities. Rachel works as an Assistant Professor of English at Memorial University’s Grenfell Campus in Newfoundland, Canada and is affiliated faculty in Grenfell’s Environmental Policy Institute. Her research examines relationships between visual culture, environments, and the social impacts of extractive industries in North America. Rachel is Co-Editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada and Reviews Editor of Journal of Environmental Media. More information about Rachel’s research, teaching, and community engagement can be found here and here.

Bob Johnson
Bob Johnson is Director of the Honors Fellows for Social Change at National University in San Diego. He is author of Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy and Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture, and he has published on subjects spanning environmental history, technology studies, and cultural studies. His current research examines the social construction of climate in southern California.

Carrie Karsgaard
Carrie Karsgaard is a Doctoral Candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta. Her doctoral research explores the participatory nature of public pedagogy on Instagram, using the large-scale data available on Instagram to trace and analyze how publics reinforce, reject, and/or destabilize settler colonialism as they leverage platform affordances to engage with the Trans Mountain pipeline issue. Carrie’s research interests include critical and anticolonial studies in international, intercultural, and environmental education.

Stephanie LeMenager
Stephanie LeMenager is the Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor in English and American Literature, and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Her work on climate change and the humanities has been featured in The New York Times, ClimateWire, Science Friday, NPR, the CBC, and other public venues. Her publications include the books Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, Manifest and Other Destinies, Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, and Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities. LeMenager’s four-volume collection of the best scholarly articles in Literature and Environment, co-edited with Professor Teresa Shewry, was published by Bloomsbury in January 2021. She is currently finishing two book projects, on fictionality in the era of climate change and the cultural meanings of public lands.

Tanner Mirrlees
Tanner Mirrlees is an Associate Professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at Ontario Tech University. Tanner was President of the Canadian Communication Association (2020-2022) and is a founding member of the Centre on Hate, Bias & Extremism (CHBE) (2017-). Tanner co-organized numerous public forums on environmental issues with the Centre for Social Justice and Capitalism Workshop (2016-2020). Some of Tanner’s current research and knowledge mobilization focuses on Silicon Valley’s green techno-politics, carbon capitalism, the far Right and climate disinformation, and Empire, war and global energy transition.

Sourayan Mookerjea
Sourayan Mookerjea is director of the Intermedia Research Studio in the Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, in Treaty Six Territory, where he specializes in critical social theory, global sociology, political ecology and intermedia research. His research addresses questions regarding the cultural and class politics of renewable energy transition, and critically engages with eco-feminist degrowth and commons theory. Current research projects examine how social and environmental justice theory and praxis can delink from the colonizer’s model of the world and the world-ecologies of racial capitalism. He is co-director of Feminist Energy Futures Powershift and Environmental Social Justice as well as iDoc: Intermedia and Documentary and is a co-investigator on the research-creation collaboration, Speculative Energy Futures.

Swaralipi Nandi
Swaralipi Nandi holds a Ph.D. from Kent State University, Ohio in Postcolonial Literature. and teaches at Loyola Academy, India. She is the co-editor of Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere (Upenn Press) , The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction (McFarland) and Spectacles of Blood: A Study of Violence and Masculinity in Postcolonial Films (U Chicago/Zubaan). Her current research is concerned with postcolonial energy humanities and environmental literature of South Asia with a particular interest in speculative fictions of climate change. Her monograph titled Carbon Tales: Reading Energy in Indian Texts is forthcoming in 2024.

Anne Pasek
Anne Pasek is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of climate communication, the environmental humanities, and science and technology studies. She studies how carbon becomes communicable in different communities and media forms, to different political and material effects. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University, as well as the Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment, and Reviews Editor for the Journal of Environmental Media.

Marcel Llavero Pasquina
Marcel Llavero Pasquina is a climate justice activist and a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is a member of the team behind the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (ejatlas.org) and regularly contributes to it. Before joining the team in January 2022, he obtained a PhD in molecular biology at the University of Cambridge. He has been active in the divestment movement in the UK, has participated in global youth coalitions at UNFCCC COPs and in Ende Gelaende actions.

Stephen Paur
Stephen Paur is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona, USA, where he teaches first-year writing and second-language writing. His research interests include critical pedagogy, the rhetoric of climate change, the politics of language and literacy, and the history of writing technologies. His dissertation (in progress) analyzes some of the ideological and rhetorical mechanisms by which North-South environmental inequalities are created, concealed, and contested. He is particularly interested in social movement efforts to use the climate crisis as a pretext for the formation of new, anti-imperialist international solidarities and a global ecological class consciousness.

Karen Pinkus
Karen Pinkus is Professor at Cornell University. Author of numerous essays in environmental humanities and climate change, her books include Fuel. A Speculative Dictionary (Minnesota, 2016).

Penelope Plaza
Penelope Plaza is Lecturer in Architecture at the School of the Built Environment, University of Reading, UK. Her research engages with the politics of culture, public space and state power, with a particular focus in urban artivism and petrocultures. Her monograph, Culture as renewable oil: how territory, bureaucratic power and culture coalesce in the Venezuelan petrostate, unpacks the links between state power, oil energy, and urban space and culture by looking at the petro-socialist Venezuelan oil state to examine how oil is a cultural resource, in addition to a natural resource, implying that struggles over culture implicate oil, and struggles over oil implicate culture. The book was shortlisted for the Royal Geography Society’s Political Geography Research Group Book Award 2019-2020, awarded Special Commendation by the judging panel.

Fiona Polack
Fiona Polack is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, as well as Academic Editor at Memorial University’s scholarly press. Her research in energy humanities focuses primarily on cultural figurations of the offshore oil industry. She currently leads the SSHRC Insight project “Oil Rigs and Islands” (2020-25) and, with fellow Petrocultures researcher Danine Farquharson, is presently co-editing Cold Water Oil: Imagining Offshore Petroleum Cultures for Routledge’s Environment and Sustainability series. Fiona and Danine hosted Petrocultures 2016: The Offshore at Memorial University.

Kimberly Skye Richards
Kimberly Skye Richards obtained a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California-Berkeley. Her research examines how Indigenous and anti-colonial artists and activists use embodied practices to disrupt the development of new extractive infrastructure and foster a “petro-political consciousness,” and inspire a just energy transition. She recently co-edited an issue of Canadian Theatre Review on “Extractivism and Performance” (April 2020) and has also published in TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and several edited collections. At present she is a Public Energy Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Transition in Energy, Culture, and Society network at the University of Alberta.

Katie Ritson
Katie Ritson studied German and Scandinavian literature and culture at Cambridge University and LMU Munich, and she subsequently worked for many years as managing editor at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society in Munich, where she is still based. Her doctoral project on the North Sea coasts in literature from five different countries piqued her interest in offshore extraction and how North Sea oil and gas makes cultural landfall. Her current research on energy cultures of the North Sea is funded by the German Research Council.

Emily Roehl
Emily Roehl is a Lecturer in the Honors College at Texas State University and the co-founder of artist book publisher Mystery Spot Books. Roehl previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Transitions in Energy, Culture, and Society program at the University of Alberta and as a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Roehl holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and writes about energy, art, and environmental justice at the confluence of cultural history and media studies. Her current research focuses on the art and media that has emerged from the movements against KXL, DAPL, and Line 3.

Anaïs Roesch
Anaïs Roesch has been working on the crossing of cultural and environmental stakes for over ten years. She joined the think tank The Shift Project in 2019 to carry out a study on how the cultural sector in France takes into account energy and climate stakes. In 2021, she co-published the book Decarbonize Culture. Anaïs worked for COAL and produced ArtCOP21, a festival entirely focused on climate issues during the COP21.
Anaïs has graduated in International Relations from Sciences Po Grenoble (France) and the Simón Bolivar Andean University (Ecuador). Anaïs also holds a Master’s degree of Arts in Curatorial Studies from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (Germany). She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation in sociology, on the engagement of visual artists in the field of ecology in France, at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Karl Emil Rosenbæk
Karl Emil Rosenbæk is a PhD student at the University of Southern Denmark. His PhD project wishes to transport the insights of petroculture studies to a Scandinavian context, where the understanding of oil as culture is a fairly understudied subject. In Scandinavia there is, however, a present ambiguity of green frontierism and continuing oil dependency and this is the background for Karl Emil’s preliminary study of Scandinavian petrofiction. His work asks how this ambiguous oil relation is being negotiated aesthetically and what does this possibly mean for the vital response to the climate crisis?

Terra Schwerin Rowe
Terra Schwerin Rowe is associate professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Texas, a leading program in environmental philosophy. She received a PhD in Theological and Philosophical Studies from Drew University. Her current research focuses on imaginaries of matter/energy as they vitalize or obstruct racial capitalist extractivism. She is co-director of the AAR seminar on Energy, Extraction, and Religion and on the steering committee of the academy’s Religion and Ecology unit. Her most recent book, Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-theology (T&T Clark, Bloomsbury), was released in 2022. Other recent publications include essays on oil, matter, and vitalisms: “The Matter of Oil: Extraction Vitalisms and Enchantment” (in Bergmann, Rigby, and Scott (Eds.), Religion, Materialism and Ecology, 2023), “Oily Animations: On Protestantism and Petroleum” (in Bauman, Bray, and Eaton (Eds.), Immanent Religiosities, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking, 2023).

Gianfranco Selgas
Gianfranco Selgas is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London, UK, and an affiliated researcher at the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. His research focuses on the cultural and political ecology of extractivism and energy consumption across Latin America and the Caribbean. His current book project tracks the cultural and environmental history of Venezuela’s regional extractive zones, rethinking the relations between materiality, energy, and the unequal ecology of capitalism in Venezuela. He co-leads the interdisciplinary research collective Archives of the Planetary Mine. More on his work can be found at www.gianfrancoselgas.com.
Camille-Mary Sharp
Camille-Mary Sharp is a Faculty Fellow in the Program in Museum Studies at New York University. She researches the intersection of museums and the climate crisis, specifically through museums’ relationships with oil and mining industries.

Carolin Slickers
Carolin Slickers is PhD candidate at a joint programme of the Universities of Bonn and Florence. She studied French, German, and Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn, the Sorbonne Paris IV, and the University of St. Andrews. Her research interests are energy transitions from a cultural perspective, car culture and gender, and the geographies of oil. She is part of the Network “Energie und Literatur” (Energy and Literature), and published on teaching Energy Humanities as academic practice (2023). Currently, she is working on her thesis on Locating Oil in European Petrofiction in the Age of the Great Acceleration (working title).
Apart from her research, she writes feminist essays (Missy Magazine) and reviews on fine art with a focus on post-humanism. She is involved in the German green political party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) as speaker of a feminist work group.

Hiroki Shin
Hiroki Shin is a Vice-chancellor’s Fellow in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. He was a co-investigator of the AHRC research project ‘Material Cultures of Energy’ (2015–2017) and principal investigator of its follow-on project (2018–2019). His ongoing project examines the role of cultural and heritage institutions—museums, science centres, archives and heritage sites—across the United Kingdom, Europe, America, and Asia in response to the climate crisis. He is currently working on a monograph on the history of energy consumption in twentieth-century Japan.

Janet Stewart
Janet Stewart is Professor of German & Visual Culture at Durham University, where she is founding member of the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture and a member of the Durham Energy Institute. Her research in the energy humanities has a focus on visual culture. Together with Zeigam Azizov, she co-curated an international exhibition on ‘OilScapes’ held at Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen in 2012. Her publications in this area include work to define the concept of ‘extractive seeing’. She is currently working on a research monograph, ‘Curating Europe’s Oil’, which employs this idea to frame its exploration of the place of oil in twenty-first century cultural memory. She is also co-editing, with Graeme MacDonald, a Handbook of Energy Humanities for Routledge and is part of an international collaborative research project funded by the Swedish Research Council investigating Climate Imaginaries.

Scott Stoneman
Scott Stoneman (he/him) teaches in the Department of Communication Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). He is the host of the Pretty Heady Stuff podcast, which has included guests such as Rebecca Wanzo, Neil Cohn, Raj Patel, Andreas Malm, El Jones, Judith Butler, K. Wayne Yang, Anna Tsing and many others. He produced a six-episode podcast series with the After Oil collective called Volatile Trajectories in 2022. His research has focused on fat studies, demedicalizing lifestyle, the spectacularized representation of violence, among other subjects. He is the co-author of the forthcoming book Widening Scripts: Cultivating Feminist Care in Academic Labor, from Punctum Books.

Kenneth Tay
Kenneth Tay is Assistant Curator at Singapore Art Museum. He writes on media histories, global infrastructures and logistics, and is the author of The Sea is All Highway (Temporary Press, 2019). Recent exhibitions include Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia and Lonely Vectors (both 2022). Presently, he is working on a curatorial project that examines petro-aesthetics in relation to Singapore’s political economy. He holds a MA in Media Studies from The New School.

Oxana Timofeeva
Oxana Timofeeva is Sc.D., professor at “Stasis” Center for Philosophy at the European University at St. Petersburg, member of the artistic collective “Chto Delat” (“What is to be done”), and the author of books Solar Politics (Polity 2022), How to Love a Homeland (Kayfa ta, 2020), History of Animals (Bloomsbury 2018), This is not That (in Russian, Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 2022)), Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (in Russian, New Literary Observer, 2009), and other writings.

Dawn Darwin Weaks
Dawn Darwin Weaks is a pastor in the Permian Basin, the world’s top oil producer. She received her B.A. from Baylor University, her M. Div. from Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University, and her D.Min. from St. Paul School of Theology. She has served as an ordained Disciples of Christ minister in Texas and Missouri for 25 years. In 2014, she became the co-pastor of Connection Christian Church in Odessa, Texas. She has published numerous articles and speaks throughout the country on progressive Christian ecclesiology. Her book, Breakthrough: Trusting God for Big Change in Your Church, published by Chalice Press, tells part of the story of her Odessa congregation responding to the needs of its extraction-based community.
Jennifer Wenzel
Jennifer Wenzel has been a regular participant in Petrocultures since 2012. Her 2006 article, “Petro-Magic-Realism: Towards a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature,” helped pioneer the study of literature and oil. With Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, she co-edited Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham, 2017). Trained as a scholar of African and South Asian literatures, she has brought a postcolonial perspective to the emergence of environmental and energy humanities. Her most recent monograph, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature, was published by Fordham in 2019. With Imre Szeman, she is co-editing Energized: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy and Environment. She is jointly appointed in English and Comparative literature and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.

Sarah Marie Wiebe
Sarah Marie Wiebe (PhD, Political Science) grew up on unceded Coast Salish territory (British Columbia) and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria, where she teaches in the graduate Community Development program. She is the author of Life against States of Emergency: Revitalizing Treaty Relations from Attawapiskat (2023) and Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley (2017). Her research focuses on interpretive policy analysis, critical policy studies, environmental justice, public engagement, deliberative democracy and critical ecofeminism. She is a Co-Founder of FERN, the Feminist Environmental Research Network, Director of the Design Justice Collaboratory, a Board Member of the Climate Disaster Project and Co-Director of the Seascape Storytelling Studio. The shortfilm To Fish as Formerly, co-produced with members of the Tsawout Nation, was screened at the Legacy Art Gallery and the Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea. For more information, visit: www.sarahmariewiebe.com or follow Sarah on Twitter @smwiebe.

Casey Williams
Casey Williams is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University. His work examines representations of climate change in U.S. media to better understand the social and cultural barriers to a just energy transition. With Michael Gaffney and Claire Ravenscroft, he co-edited a special issue of the journal Polygraph on “Marxism and Climate Change,” and his entry on “Energy Humanities” will appear in the updated Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. His public writing on topics ranging from energy transition to far-right climate politics to the South African labor movement has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jewish Currents, In These Times, and elsewhere.

Daniel Worden
Daniel Worden is Associate Professor in the School of Individualized Study at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of Neoliberal Nonfictions: The Documentary Aesthetic from Joan Didion to Jay-Z (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and the coeditor of Oil Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), among others. He is currently working on a project about the aesthetic, industrial, and material imbrications of the comics medium and energy cultures, from ink-stained woodblocks to intergalactic superheroes. His website is http://danielworden.com.

Nikoleta Zampaki
Nikoleta Zampaki is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Faculty of Philology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She was previously an Instructor at Utah University. Her disciplines are Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities, Digital Humanities, and Comparative Literature. She is editor and reviewer at many journals, Associate and Managing Editor at the Journal of Ecohumanism, and current member of Education Team of NASA, V.I.N.E.-Glenn Research Center. She has also participated in many conferences and she is a multilingual student working on English, French, Romanian, Russian, Chinese, Hungarian, Maori, and Turkish. Zampaki is co-editor with Professor Peggy Karpouzou of the book series “Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures” at Rowman & Littlefield, and “Environmental Humanities” at TPLondon based in the U.K.. Her academic website is https://uoa.academia.edu/NikoletaZampaki.
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