Energy Transitions in Long Modernity

Conference organized by Robert N. Watson (University of California, Los Angeles), Tiffany Jo Werth (University of California, Davis), and Todd Borlik (Purdue University)

Co-sponsored by the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and the UC Davis Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program

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 and does not include any material written prior to the mid-twentieth century. As this indicates, research in the energy humanities remains focused somewhat myopically on the past seventy-five years, and often appeals to reductive notions of an Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century as the terminus a quo for any investigation into the topic. 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” (16^th–21^stcentury). Our guiding questions are: What are the cultural narratives that surround moments of energy transitions? Should we speak of energy “transitions” or energy “additions”? How is energy represented in the visual and textual archives of major energy consumers such as North America and England, particularly at moments of colonial ambition and expansion? 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.

The local and global impact of harnessing such energy pathways cannot be overstated. In particular, this conference will highlight the penumbra of energy grids for its effect on indigenous, minority, and vulnerable populations and species. This conference exploration over the long durée of history seeks 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.

Speakers
Robert Cudd, University of California, Los Angeles
Eric Daniel Fournier, University of California, Los Angeles
Victoria Googasian, Georgetown University in Qatar
Ursula K. Heise, University of California, Los Angeles
Graeme Macdonald, University of Warwick
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, University of California, Davis
Vin Nardizzi, University of British Columbia
David Rapson, University of California, Davis
Matthew C. Swanson, University of California, Los Angeles

The conference is free to attend with advance registration and will be held in-person at the Clark Library. The registration form will post here approximately a month in advance, and registration will close on Monday, January 6 at 5:00 p.m. Seating is limited at the Clark Library; walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits.

Image: Jan Cossiers, Prometheus, oil on canvas, 1636–1638, Museo del Prado, Madrid.