Powering the Future
Having organised a panel on petrocultures as part of Birkbeck's Arts Week last year, "Environmental Futures: Oil, Ecology, Petrocultures," I'm delighted to be working with Dr Graeme Macdonald (University of Warwick) in co-editing a special issue of the Open Library of Humanities megajournal.
Our issue is titled "Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy" and will examine texts that offer different visions beyond oil-driven (petro-)modernity. This topic speaks to the importance of, and turning critical attention towards, energy humanities scholarship that examines how energy resources are depicted in literature – from steam-powered Romanticism, to oil-driven Modernism, and through to solar-powered utopian and space opera futures.
For more information, you can read the call for articles here:
Featured image by James Vaughan under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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