At Home in the Petromodern Paradox
Landscape and Community in the Bakken Boom
Kyle Conway
Drawing on interviews, historical records, data analysis, and his own ties to the region, Conway shows how the petromodern paradox –the logic of solving the problems created by oil with more oil – fuelled both opportunity and conflict in a community transformed by oil exploration.
October 2026 240pp 26 images, 8 tables
9780228027799 £22.99 PB MCGILL-QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Renewable Normal
After Oil Collective
Edited by Caleb Wellum
Eva-Lynn Jagoe
Graeme Macdonald
Imre Szeman
Jennifer Wenzel & Mark Simpson
Confronts the aesthetic, affective, and political dimensions of the transition to renewable energy. The book examines how renewable energy is being marshaled to sustain existing systems of inequality and exploitation under a banner of techno-optimism and green growth.
Provocations
October 2026 146pp
9781496249333 £18.99 PB UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Impasse Poetics at the Nordic Oil
Coast
Contemporary Petrofiction from Denmark and Norway
Karl Emil
Rosenbaek Reetz
The first major study of contemporary Nordic petrofiction. Through a variety of cultural texts, Rosenbaek Reetz exposes the tensions in which green frontier ideas must coexist with the ongoing reliance on oil and gas, and critiques the paradox of Nordic nations positioning themselves as climate leaders while remaining deeply tied to fossil fuel economies.
Energy and Society
May 2026 260pp 11 b&w images
9781959000761 £20.99 PB
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Petroforms Oil and the Shaping of Nigerian Aesthetics
Helen Kapstein
Contributes a muchneeded theory of form and genre to the cuttingedge field of petrocriticism, itself an offshoot of developments in postcolonial ecocriticism. Studies of resource fiction and inquiries in the energy humanities have recently taken their rightful place as necessary reflections on the role of the literary imagination in intervening in the Anthropocene as we find ourselves placed in the face of a fossil fuel crisis, climate change, and mass extinctions.
Energy and Society
November 2025 200pp 15 illus.
9781959000563 £17.99 PB WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Why We Struggle to Go Green Hard Truths About the Clean Energy Transition
Thomas Manuel Ortiz
To find a credible path to a sustainable future, we must set aside hopes of building our way out of humanity's addictions to energy and material convenience. Ortiz offers a clear-eyed assessment of our efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change. Ortiz provides an in-depth yet easy-to-understand assessment of the harsh reality facing mankind.
September 2025 260pp
9781965766286 £19.99 PB STONEY CREEK PUBLISHING GROUP
Energy Talk
Green Knowledge from Greece's Silicon Plains
Daniel M. Knight
Disrupts the claims of institutionalized categories such as sustainability, green economy, climate change, and net zero that promote a shared consensus on energy transition. Energy Talk offers an ethnographically and theoretically rich rereading of established categories usually associated with the green transition, from their local particularity to the potential implications for planetary relations.
Power Shift
Keywords for a New Politics of Energy
Edited by Imre Szeman & Jennifer Wenzel
Foreword by David Nye
Traces recent social and cultural shifts in how we understand energy, the environment, and the challenges of global warming. The need to transition to renewables has become the guiding reality of our energy present and future. But what does this moment of energy transition look like for those struggling to make it happen in a way that benefits every individual and all communities?
Energy and Society
April 2025 296pp 1 image
9781959000495 £20.99 PB
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
We Were in It
Stories about Energy Transition
Edited by Lisa Moore & Sheena Wilson
Illustrated by Kamei Lim
Experts from academia, science, art, law, and policy unite in a bold exploration of the climate crisis through incisive flash fiction. Combining research with creative storytelling, the collection reflects on past and present challenges to envision a future free from the grip of fossilfueled cultures.
April 2025 184pp
9781990445378 £26.99 PB
MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Futures of the Sun
The
Struggle over Renewable Life
Imre Szeman
Explains how and why key players are working to make sure a greener future will look much like the world we live in today. He examines the rhetoric, ideology, and politics of liberal nationalists intent on fighting a war against climate change, billionaire solar entrepreneurs who believe only in themselves, and the populist far right who want no change at all.
Forerunners: Ideas First
October 2024 108pp
9781517917692 £9.00 PB
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
Saharan Winds
Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara
Joanna Allan Saharan Winds contributes to a fairer energy horizon by illuminating the role of imaginaries--how we understand energy sources such as wind and the meanings we attach to wind--in determining the wider politics, whether oppressive or just, associated with energy systems. This book turns to various cultures and communities across different time periods in one space, Western Sahara, to explore how wind imaginaries affect the development, management, and promotion of windfarms; the distribution of energy that windfarms produce; and, vitally, the type of politics mediated by all these elements combined.
Energy and Society
October 2024 268pp 1 b&w map 9781959000235 £22.99 PB WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Petroturfing
Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media
Jordan B. Kinder
Petroturfing presents an incisive look into how Canada’s pro-oil movement has leveraged social media to rebrand the extractive economy as a positive force. Adapting its title from the concept of astroturfing, which refers to the practice of disguising political and corporate media campaigns as grassroots movements, the book exposes the consequences of this mutually informed relationship between social media and environmental politics.
June 2024 288pp 11 b&w illus. 9781517914332 £22.99 PB UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
Energy in the Nordic World
Mogens Rüdiger & Anna Åberg
In high-income countries, energy is foundational for industry, daily living, transportation, entertainment, and more. But, like other critical resources, it is limited and the availability of energy sources varies, from oilrich Norway to windswept Denmark to a geothermalpowered Iceland. The five Nordic countries may be at the forefront of the "green transition," but neither the history of energy nor its present trajectory are uniform in the region. Åberg and Rüdiger outline the history of energy in the Nordic countries from the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century to the present day and a more sustainable future.
The Nordic World
May 2024 124pp
9788772198668 £9.99 PB
AARHUS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Geologic Life
Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics
Kathryn Yusoff
of Race
In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Examining both the history of geology as a discipline and ongoing mineral and resource extraction, Yusoff locates forms of imperial geology embedded in Western and Enlightenment thought and highlights how it creates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and antiBrown environmental and racial injustices.
May 2024 608pp 55 illus.
9781478030300 £27.99 PB
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
No More Fossils
Dominic Boyer
In No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of the rise of fossil civilization through successive phases of sucropolitics (plantation sugar), carbopolitics (industrial coal), and petropolitics (oily automobility and plasticity), showing what tethers us to the ecocidal trajectory of petroculture today and what it will take to overcome the forces that mire us in place. He also looks ahead toward the world that the rapid electrification of vehicles, buildings, and power is creating. What can we do to make electroculture more just and sustainable than the petroculture we are leaving behind?
Forerunners: Ideas First
October 2023 108pp
9781517916367 £9.00 PB
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
Wind Energy Revolution Volume 30
How the 1970s Energy Crisis Fostered Renewed Interest in ElectricGenerating Technology
Christopher C. Gillis Foreword by Michael Bergey
It may sound simple. Fashion a set of blades, attach them to a generator, set the machine on top of a tower, and let the wind do the work of creating electricity. Not so. Most of these attempts fail. Christopher Gillis examines the efforts to develop ‘small’ wind generators for use at homes, farms, and ranches following the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo.
Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies in the Humanities
August 2023 352pp 173 b&w photos, 20 line art, 7 figures, 1 table
9781648430626 £44.00 HB
TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY PRESS
American Energy Cinema
Edited by Robert Lifset, Raechel Lutz & Sarah StanfordMcIntyre
Explores how Hollywood movies have portrayed energy from the early film era to the present. Looking at classics like Silkwood and There Will Be Blood, and quirkier fare like A Is for Atom and Convoy, the book argues that films have both reflected existing beliefs and conjured new visions about the role of energy.
Energy and Society
April 2023 370pp 15 b&w images, 1 table, 2 graphs 9781952271762 £22.99 PB
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Rogues in the Postcolony
Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy
in India
Stacey Balkan
Rogues in the Postcolony is a study of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels that dramatize the impacts of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation on local communities in several Indian states. In this materialist history of development on the subcontinent, Stacey Balkan considers works by Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga that critique violent campaigns of enclosure and dispossession at the hands of corporate entities like the English East India Company and its many legatees. Histories of Capitalism and the Environment
February 2022 222pp 3 b&w images 9781952271366 £22.99 PB
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Engaging the Atom
The History of Nuclear Energy and Society in Europe from the 1950s to the Present
Edited by Arne Kaijser Markku Lehtonen, Jan-Henrik Meyer & Mar Rubio-Varas
With the aim of overcoming the disciplinary and national fragmentation that characterizes much research on nuclear energy, Engaging the Atom brings together specialists from a variety of fields to analyze comparative case studies across Europe and the United States. It explores evolving relationships between society and the nuclear sector from the origins of civilian nuclear power until the present, asking why nuclear energy has been more contentious in some countries than in others and why some countries have never gone nuclear, or have decided to phase out nuclear, while their neighbors have committed to the so-called nuclear renaissance.
Energy and Society
December 2021 336pp 7 tables, 8 graphs 9781952271328 £26.99 PB
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Gasoline Dreams
Waking Up from Petroculture
Simon Orpana
Foreword by Imre Szeman
Afterword by Mark Simpson
Written in an engaging graphic format that makes relevant historical, cultural, and political analyses of global warming and petrol dependency important to a wide audience, Gasoline Dreams refutes the progress narratives that depict contemporary, energy-intensive societies as the inevitable product of human history. By revealing the contingencies, coercions, and compulsions this myth disguises, the book allows us to imagine truly progressive alternatives. Rather than casting climate change as a problem for technological elites to solve, the book confronts the everyday realities that reinforce our dependence on fossil fuels, offering a space of hope and engagement from which concerned people can work to build a more sustainable future.
September 2021 208pp 180 b&w illus.
9780823297726 £13.99 PB
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change
Accelerating Ride to Global Crisis
Edited by Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad
Approaching mobility not solely as a material, logistical question but as a phenomenon mediated by culture, this book interrogates popular assumptions deeply entangled with energy choices. Rethinking transportation, the contributors argue, necessarily involves fundamental understandings of consumption, freedom, and self.
Energy and Society
October 2020 274pp 19 b&w images 9781949199642 £24.99 PB
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Windfall
Unlocking a Fossil-Free Future
Ketan Joshi
Renewable energy expert
Ketan Joshi examines how wind power inspired the creation of a weird, fabricated disease, and why the speed with which emissions could have been reduced – like putting a price on carbon – was hampered by a flurry of policy disasters. He then plots a way forward to a future where communities champion equitable new clean tech projects, where Australia grows past a reliance on toxic fuels, and where the power of people is used to rattle fossil fuel advocates from their complacency.
September 2020 272pp
9781742236469 £16.99 PB
NEWSOUTH PUBLISHING
Fighting for Andean Resources
Extractive Industries, Cultural Politics, and Environmental
Struggles in Peru
Vladimir R. Gil Ramón
Fighting for Andean Resources focuses on the competing agendas for mining benefits and the battles over their impact on proximate communities in the recent expansion of the Peruvian mining frontier. The book complements renewed scrutiny of how globalization nurtures not solely antagonism but also negotiation and participation.
June 2020 328pp 23 b&w illus., 4 maps, 7 tables 9780816530717 £50.00 HB
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS
The Disposition of Nature
Environmental Crisis and World Literature
Jennifer Wenzel
Finalist, 2022 Ecocriticism Book Prize, Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.
Shortlisted, 2020 Book Prize, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.
The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time.
December 2019 352pp
9780823286775 £29.99 PB
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
Energy Culture
Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond
Edited by Imre Szeman & Jeff Diamanti
Energy Culture is a provocative book about oil’s firm grip on our politics and everyday lives. It brings together essays and artwork produced in a collaborative environment to stimulate new ways of thinking and to achieve a more just and sustainable world. Imbued with a sense of urgency and hope, Energy Culture exposes the deep imbrications of energy and culture while pointing provocatively to ways of thinking and living otherwise.
Energy and Society
November 2019 272pp 59 illus.
9781949199123 £26.99 PB
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Birth of Energy
Fossil
Fuels,
Thermodynamics,
and the Politics of Work
Cara New Daggett In The Birth of Energy
Cara New Daggett traces the genealogy of contemporary notions of energy back to the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics to challenge the underlying logic that informs today's uses of energy. These early resourcebased concepts of power first emerged during the Industrial Revolution and were tightly bound to Western capitalist domination and the politics of industrialized work.
Elements
September 2019 280pp 7 illus.
9781478006329 £20.99 PB
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Energopolitics
Wind and Power in the Anthropocene
Dominic Boyer Boyer examines the politics of wind power and how it is shaped by myriad factors, from the legacies of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance to state bureaucracy and corporate investment. Drawing on interviews with activists, campesinos, engineers, bureaucrats, politicians, and bankers, Boyer outlines the fundamental impact of energy and fuel on political power. Boyer also demonstrates how large conceptual frameworks cannot adequately explain the fraught and uniquely complicated conditions on the isthmus, illustrating the need to resist narratives of anthropocenic universalism and to attend to local particularities.
July 2019 280pp 35 illus.
9781478003779 £26.99 PB
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
On Petrocultures
Globalization, Culture, and Energy
Imre Szeman
On Petrocultures brings together key essays by Imre Szeman, a leading scholar in the field of energy humanities and a critical voice in debates about globalization and neoliberalism. Szeman’s most important and influential essays, in dialog with exciting new pieces written for the book, investigate everevolving circuits of power in the contemporary world, as manifested in struggles over space and belonging, redefinitions of work and individual autonomy, and the deep links between energy use and climate change.
Energy and Society
March 2019 252pp
9781946684882 £20.99 PB
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Kathryn Yusoff
Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.
Forerunners: Ideas First
November 2018 130pp
9781517907532 £9.00 PB UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
Oil and Urbanization on the Pacific Coast
Ralph Bramel Lloyd
and the Shaping of the Urban West
Michael R. Adamson
Tells the story of oilman
Ralph Bramel Lloyd, a small business owner who drove the development of one of America's largest oil fields. Putting the history of extractive industry in dialogue with the history of urban development, Michael R. Adamson shows how energy is woven into the fabric of modern life, and how the “energy capital” of Los Angeles exerted farflung influence in the US West.
Energy and Society
August 2018 384pp 36 illus.
9781946684363 £22.99 PB WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Petrocultures
Oil, Politics, Culture
Edited by Sheena Wilson
Adam Carlson & Imre Szeman
Presenting a multifaceted analysis of the cultural, social, and political claims and assumptions that guide how we think and talk about oil, Petrocultures maps the complex and often contradictory ways in which oil has influenced the public's imagination around the world.
June 2017 544pp 17 photos
9780773550384 £34.00 PB
MCGILL-QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY PRESS
Fueling Culture
101 Words for Energy and Environment
Jennifer Wenzel
& Patricia Yaeger
Edited by Imre Szeman
Offers a compendium of keywords written by scholars and practitioners from around the world and across the humanities and social sciences. These keywords offer new ways of thinking about energy as both the source and the limit of how we inhabit culture, with the aim of opening up new ways of understanding the seemingly irresolvable contradictions of dependence upon unsustainable energy forms.
February 2017 456pp
9780823273911 £31.00 PB
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oil and Nation
A History of Bolivia's Petroleum Sector
Stephen C. Cote
Places petroleum at the centre of Bolivia's contentious twentiethcentury history. Bolivia's oil, Cote argues, instigated the largest war in Latin America in the 1900s, provoked the first nationalization of a major foreign company by a Latin American state, and shaped both the course and the consequences of Bolivia's transformative National Revolution of 1952.
Energy and Society
December 2016 224pp
9781943665471 £20.99 PB
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
After Oil
Imre Szeman & Petrocultures Research Group
Explores the social, cultural and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. Written collectively by participants in the first After Oil School, After Oil explains why the adoption of renewable, ecologically sustainable energy sources is only the first step of energy transition.
April 2016 78pp
9780995042001 £9.99 PB
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Subterranean Estates
Life Worlds of Oil and Gas
Edited by Hannah Appe Arthur Mason
& Michael Watts
Gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars and experts to provide a critical topography of the hydrocarbon industry, understood not solely as an assemblage of corporate forms but rather as an expansive and porous network of laborers and technologies, representation and expertise, and the ways of life oil and gas produce at points of extraction, production, marketing, consumption, and combustion.
June 2015 432pp 21 halftones, 4 tables, 3 charts 9780801479861 £33.00 PB
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Structural Human Ecology
New Essays in Risk, Energy, and Sustainability
Edited by Thomas Dietz & Andrew Jorgenson
The desire to understand people's influence on ecosystems has inspired scientific studies and analyses of the stress individuals and communities place on the environment, human well-being, and the tradeoffs between them. As an emerging discipline, Structural Human Ecology is devoted to unlocking the dynamic links between population, environment, social organization, and technology
December 2013 208pp
9780874223170 £21.99 PB
WSU PRESS
Subterranean Struggles
New
Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America
Edited by Anthony Bebbington & Jeffrey Bury
The first analytical collection to combine geographical and political ecological approaches to the post1990s changes in Latin America's extractive economy, Subterranean Struggles closely examines the factors driving this expansion and the sociopolitical, environmental, and political economic consequences it has wrought.
November 2013 361pp
9781477302064 £26.99 PB
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
