Call for Interest: International Workshop “Early Petropoetics” (15-16 January 2026)
Call for Interest: International Workshop “Early Petropoetics”
Petroleum has had a profound influence on society, economy, politics and culture for over a century, playing a pivotal role in the emergence of “petromodernity” (Steininger/Klose 2020, Szeman/Boyer 2017). A significant body of research has examined the cultural impact of oil, with a particular focus on North America in the post-1950s period (see works by LeMenager 2014, Carter 2022, Hitchcock 2010). Less attention has been paid to the period of its early extraction and to other regional contexts, such as Central Europe, where one of the first oil industries was located in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary.
Studying this time period deserves our attention as it is associated with different materialities of drilling and transporting oil, specific working conditions, alternative uses in economy and society, and so on. This results in social and cultural narratives of oil and a rich material culture which emerges from distinct local conditions and zones of international and inter-imperial contact which have not been studied extensively yet.
Following the assertion by Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer that contemporary humans are not merely consumers but also “citizens and subjects of fossil fuels” (Szeman/Boyer 2017, 1), it is imperative to examine the origins of oil extraction to identify the narratives, gender dynamics, cultural stereotypes, and other elements that have contributed to the formation of the oil era and have been influencing societies since the very beginning of oil’s industrial use.
In an international workshop, we aim to therefore facilitate a discussion on early cultural representations of oil and the oil industry preceding the 1950s oil boom and the subsequent widespread adoption of individual automobiles. We believe that the study of these early petropoetics can provide a foundation to defining an ‘early oil paradigm.’ By delving deeper into the beginnings of industrial oil extraction, we want to historicize the discourse on oil and explore new geopoetic connections, by broadening the geographical scope of research on cultural representations of oil in Cultural Studies. This, we believe, will provide another step forward in understanding how fossil fuels have shaped our identity and our way of life and thereby contribute to discourses about green transformations.
We invite scholars from all fields of Cultural Studies working on or planning to work on early (19th and early 20th century) representations of oil and its extraction in literature, film, music, visual arts and performance to a two-day workshop in Berlin onJanuary 15-16, 2026 to join the discussion. We are particularly interested in including scholarly voices from outside Western contexts (e.g., Central and Eastern Europe, South America, West Asia). The workshop is jointly organized by the Institute for Slavic and Hungarian Studies of Humboldt-University in Berlin and the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.
If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please send an email to Anna Seidel (seidelay@hu.berlin.de) and Clemens Günther (clemens.guenther@fu-berlin.de) with a short bio and brief description of your project (150 words) by March 31, 2025.
We are currently securing funding to cover travel and accommodation costs, and we are confident that we will able to reimburse your travel expenses. In the event that you encounter financial or other constraints that prevent you from traveling, we will provide online participation options.
We are looking forward to your submissions!
Clemens Günther (Free University Berlin) & Anna Seidel (Humboldt-University of Berlin)
Clemens Günther is a research fellow at the Institute for East European studies in Berlin. In 2021, his dissertation "The Metahistoriographic Revolution. Problematizations of Historical Knowledge in Contemporary Russian Literature" was published by Böhlau. He is currently working on his second book project entitled "The Nature of Catastrophe. The Ecological Poetics of Russian Realism" in which he examines cultural responses to storms, epidemics, famines and floods in the long 19th century. Since 2022, he is the head of the interdisciplinary and international research group "Russian Ecospheres", founded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. His further research interests include the symbolic geography of the imperial periphery, late Soviet popular music and the cultural history of Soviet cybernetics.
Anna Seidel is a scholar of comparative and Slavic literatures, with a research focus in urban narratives, intermediality, gender studies, and Energy Humanities. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Humboldt University of Berlin, and is the author of the book Die Stadt im Ausnahmezustand. Räumliche Subversionen bei Lidija Ginzburg, Miron Białoszewski und Dževad Karahasan (transcript 2025) as well as co-editor of the volume Historical and Contemporary Challenges for Central and Eastern European Cities (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming). Her current research focuses on representations of masculinity and femininity in the context of the increasing industrialization in early petrofiction from Central Europe. Since 2023, she holds a teaching and research position at the Institute for Slavic and Hungarian Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin.