Globalizing the Anthropocene

Sunday, December 10, 2023
2:15 – 3:30 PM

Location: Bin Jelmood House, Covered Courtyard, Msheireb Museums

The concept of the Anthropocene has become nearly ubiquitous in environmental rhetoric. It is the epoch in which the extractive energy practices of human beings determine the fate of the planet. But the story of the Anthropocene is often told from the perspective of the Global North and its carbon-intensive ways of life. In this panel, we will hear from scholars whose work presents the Anthropocene in a richer light, as an era and event shaped by many different geographic nodes and networks of energy production and use.

Dana Luciano (Moderator)

Dana Luciano is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, where she has taught since 2018. Previously, she taught at Georgetown University, where she co-directed the Mellon Sawyer seminar, “Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change” (2016- 2018) and served as Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program (2009-2012). Her most recent monograph, How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth Century U.S. will be published by Duke University Press in January 2024. She is a founding editor of Regeneration: Environment, Arts, Culture, a new multimedia, open-access environmental humanities journal. She is currently at work on a monograph tentatively titled Time and Again: The Affective Circuits of Spirit Photography.

Liz Chatterjee

Liz Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor of Environmental History and the College at the University of Chicago. Her recent and forthcoming publications cover a wide range of topics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century energy history, including the Asian Anthropocene, gender and early solar energy, the 1970s oil shocks in the oil-importing global South, and the political economy of Narendra Modi’s India. She is currently completing her first scholarly book, Electric Democracy: An Energy History of India from Colonialism to Climate Change.

Ryan Cecil Jobson

Ryan Cecil Jobson is an anthropologist and social critic of the Caribbean. His first book manuscript, The Petro-State Masquerade, is a historical ethnography of fossil fuel industries and postcolonial state building in Trinidad and Tobago. Excavating more than a century of commercial oil, gas, and petrochemical development, he theorizes how the tenuous relationship between hydrocarbons and political power is upheld through a “masquerade of permanence” sustained by speculative offshore and deepwater extraction. He is currently working on two subsequent projects: A collection of essays on climate change and the receding horizon of habitability in the Caribbean and a manuscript on anthropological theory and method in an era of climate extinction.

Brittany Meché

Brittany Meché is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. Her research examines the politics of environmental expertise, global security projects, French and United States empire, and the making of Black/African diasporic worlds. her work has been featured in Transition, Antipode, Society and Space, ACME, Environment and Society, and in the edited volume A Research Agenda for Military Geographies. Brittany previously served as the McMillan-Stewart residential fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She is currently completing two book manuscripts; Sustainable Empire: Nature, Knowledge, and Insecurity in the Sahel, and Heartbreak and Other Geographies: Assembling Katherine McKittrick.