news & media

[Sep2026] Great to have this book in my hands at last! More than two years of work have gone into this, from initial discussions with my brilliant co-editors Frederike and Søren, to our workshop with the 23 (!) contributing authors in Copenhagen, to multiple rounds of editing and revisions. It has accompanied us from the banks of the Main river in Frankfurt to the Mediterranean sea in Perpignan and the Ocean exhibition at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, and now it is on my desk a couple of miles from the Pacific Ocean here in Berkeley. The sea is what connects us.

[Jun2026] In one of my rare forays into written German, I published this review of Norwegian writer Agnes Ravatn’s novel Doggerland (2025). What a great read! It is a joy to be reminded of how much fun a literary text can be – especially when it’s a literary text about the pain and pleasure of literary culture. I hope this novel is translated so that I can share it more widely

[Dec2025] 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

[Nov2025] 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?

[Jul2025] 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.

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…

by katieritson

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.

by katieritson

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…

by katieritson

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…

by katieritson

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…

by katieritson

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