Energy, Empire, and Extractivism in the Age of Conrad
Energy, Empire, and Extractivism in the Age of Conrad
May 14-15, 2024, Université Paris Cité, France
“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s Sans transition (2024) has shown that the succession of energy systems (from wood to coal, oil, nuclear, and renewables) has entailed exponential increases of all previous sources, as all sources are in a symbiotic relation ...
Farewelcome
This episode is a goodbye and a hello. Brandon Galm, the creator of EcoCast in 2020 and co-host since its inception, is now stepping away from the podcast to make more time for his new roles at Cloud County Community College in North Central Kansas. We say hello to Alex Tischer, a recent graduate from Wright State in English who is now applying to English Ph.D. programs. Brandon and Alex are on either side of the Ph.D. process, and this episode discusses the ...
“Future Library, Invisible Archive?” CLCS Nordic Forum Panel MLA 2025
2024 marks ten years since the creation of Future Library (2014-2114, Katie Paterson), a multisite artwork that comprises a forest in Norway, an anthology of literature by world renowned authors to be kept secret until its publication in 2114, and a reading room inside Deichman public library where the manuscripts are housed. In conjunction with the 2025 MLA convention’s presidential theme, “Visibility,” this panel, organized by the CLCS Nordic Forum, asks how and whether Future Library serves as an (in)visible planetary archive. We ...
KENT LINTHICUM: FEBRUARY 2024 SCHOLAR OF THE MONTH
ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for February 2024 is Kent Linthicum.
Kent Linthicum is Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University. He earned his Ph.D. from Arizona State University and was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology before accepting his current position. His work focuses on coal in nineteenth-century anglophone cultures, especially the relationship between industrialization and slavery. Dr. Linthicum’s work has appeared in Environmental Humanities, Studies in English Literature, and ...