My chapter on the resilience of petro-fiction, which draws on Élisabeth Filhol’s novel Doggerland, has been published in this new book edited by Kate Rigby and Evi Zemanek. It is free to download here:
Doggerland Rising: Oil, Literature, and Resilience
Very excited about being on the teaching team for this PhD training school in Energy Humanities at the University of Stavanger. The draft programme promises a cool mix of disciplines, from art history and literature to history and policy. And where better to think about energy history than in Stavanger?
I was very happy to have The Rough Poets: Reading Oil Worker Poetry by Melanie Dennis Unrau to review this year. It’s a great piece of scholarship on an overlooked body of work, and inspiring to read while I was working on my own monograph on North Sea petroculture. You can read my review of the book here.
BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature “Waiting for the Flood”
It was a pleasure to talk about Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter with Seán Williams in this short audio feature on the Wadden Sea. The programme is available to listen to here.
ASCET webinar 2024: Forgetting Fossils, Figuring Futures
Looking forward to starting the new year with a roundtable conversation as part of the Aesthetic and Social Constructions of Energy Transition webinar.
“Nature, Thought, Action” – Masterclass seminars in Berlin
I’m looking forward to taking part in Block 2 of these interdisciplinary seminars designed to synthesise humanities thinking with sustainable action. The seminars are organised and funded by the Henrik Steffens Guest professorship of the Nordeuropa-Institut, Humboldt University of Berlin. https://www.ni.hu-berlin.de/de/konf/henriksteffens/seminare/natur-denken-handeln
Two new petrocultural publications
Two new articles have come out of my DFG project “Offshore” this spring/summer. The article Energy in Crisis: New Perspectives on Petrocultures in the journal Ecozon@ reviews four new publications in the field. The chapter Sentimentality, Sacrifice and Oil: Reckoning with Offshore Extractive Trauma has been published in the collection To The Last Drop: Affective…
Guest Researcher at The Greenhouse, University of Stavanger
Very happy to be back in Stavanger for a three-week residency at The Greenhouse in June 2023. Besides profiting from the supportive community of researchers there, I will also be able to spend some more time at the library of the Norsk Oljemuseum, and of course appreciating the views out over the North Sea.
“Fuelling Fairytales? The Quest for an Offshore Happy End”
My talk for the Rachel Carson Center’s Lunchtime Colloquium series is now available to view online.
Seed funding for project “Intimate Energies in Domestic Spaces”
This mini-project, developed together with Abigail Harrison Moore at the University of Leeds and Ruth Sandwell at the University of Toronto, has been selected for funding as part of the Intersecting Energy Cultures Working Group at the Penn Program for Environmental Humanities. Our project uses the lens of energy practices to re-explore guidebooks, recipe-books, novels, other…
Critical PetroAesthetics Collaboratory Workshop in Oslo
The Critical PetroAesthetics group led by Sissel Furuseth at the University of Oslo has been a really constructive force in my thinking – especially during the pandemic, when our online reading group and discussions were a mainstay. So I’m thrilled to be able to spend non-virtual time with my colleagues and friends in Oslo this…
New article – reading Roy Jacobsen’s Barrøy novels as petrofiction
“Sweat, Light, and Oil: Seeing the Energy in Roy Jacobsen’s Barrøy Novels” was published in the open-access journal Edda last month. In this article I examine Roy Jacobsen’s Barrøy novels (De usynlige (2013), Hvitt hav (2015), Rigels øyne (2017) and Bare en mor (2020)) for their depiction of energetic processes. I argue that these novels are examples of petrofiction, arising out of…
Project presentation in Freiburg
On 23 June I will present my project at the Environmental Humanities Lunchtime Colloquium in Freiburg. Looking forward to an interesting discussion!
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Katie Ritson 