Energy Transitions in Long Modernity
Fri 1/10/2025 • 9:30AM - 5PM PST
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
The recent turn to the ‘energy humanities’ is only beginning to galvanize scholarship on the material and symbolic impact of energy regimes in the long history of modernity. While the 2017 anthology edited by Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer provides a handy compendium of resources and heralds the field’s arrival, its table of contents consists almost entirely of post-2000 texts. It does not include any material written prior to the mid-twentieth century. But the fact remains that humans have excelled at extracting energy from the earth long before the formation of Standard Oil or Watt’s invention of the steam engine. Harnessing the power of ocean currents and winds, to take one example, allowed for the initial voyages that brought Europeans such as Sir Francis Drake to the shores of California, or what he called Nova Albion.
California boasts itself as a hub for transitioning energy from fossil fuels to renewable sources such as wind, water, and solar power. Taking this local, contemporary perspective as its departure point, this conference looks to the past and a deep history of energy transitions (and additions) in order to better understand how to negotiate this switch. We will convene scholars around the topics of “energy,” “extraction,” and “exploitation,” in the period we are calling “long modernity” (16th–21st century). This conference brings together diverse disciplines to unpack the complex dynamics that accompany energy regime change as expressed by technological development and represented in creative media that span the centuries of long modernity and that connect the local to the global, the past to the present. We seek to understand how an energy transition might conserve, rather than ravage, the environment and species by understanding how energy infrastructures affect earth and its ecosystems.