Global Energy Cultures: How Energy Shapes Our Everyday Lives

Vicky Googasian (Moderator)

Victoria Googasian is an Assistant Professor of American Literature at Georgetown University in Qatar. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st-century American literature, narrative theory, animal studies, and the environmental humanities. She is currently completing a manuscript on species difference and narrative form in American fiction, entitled Animal Minds, Other Minds, and her work has been published in New Literary History, NOVEL: A Form on Fiction, and JML: Journal of Modern Literature. At GU-Q, she teaches courses in Culture and Politics, American Literature, and Environmental Humanities, and co-coordinates the Energy Humanities research initiative for the Center for International and Regional Studies.

Marissa Benedict and David Rueter

Marissa Benedict (1985, US) and David Rueter (1978, US) are visual artists who collaboratively produce site-adapted videos, sculptures, and drawings. Their work intercepts or re-stages objects or processes sourced from the official world, seeking to at once describe the inherited conditions of this world and to interfere with its forms of self-description. Often working with large-scale architectural or infrastructural elements, the duo lodges materiality, voice, intimacy, and at times their own bodies, into the heart of institutionalized or technologically-produced spaces. They collaborative work has been exhibited at the The Renaissance Society (2023, 2018), 34th São Paulo Bienal (2021), The Arts Club of Chicago (2020), 68 Projects in Berlin (2019), the Venice Architecture Biennial (2018), and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago (2016). They are recipients, with collaborator Daniel de Paula (BR), of a 2021 Individual Grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; and were jointly awarded a 2016-17 National Endowment for the Arts “Art Works” grant for their project Gary Lights Open Work. Benedict was a 2018-19 artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL). Rueter worked as an Assistant Professor in Art & Technology at the University of Oregon (US) from 2016-2020, and at the University of Illinois at Chicago (US) from 2015-16. The duo currently live and work in Amsterdam (NL).