Caleb Wellum, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. He writes and teaches about modern history, politics, and culture. His book about the 1970s energy crisis in the United States—Energizing Neoliberalism—is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wellum is also the Editor of Energy Humanities and a member of the Petrocultures Research Group. He contributed to the collectively authored books After Oil and Solarities and is currently co-organizing After Oil 3 at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Wellum has published on the history of energy conservation, oil futures, car films, and the future of the humanities, among other topics.
The Petrocultures Research Group's After Oil Collective recently began its After Oil 3 (AOS 3) project. One result of the first AOS 3 meeting is a six-episode podcast series called Volatile Trajectories, which has just been released online and as part of the Environmental Humanities Month 2022 Program. The podcast episodes were written and recorded over a day and a half at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in October 2022. They feature leading and emerging energy humanities researchers in conversation about how we move beyond fossil fuels and climate crisis.
In their astonishing memoirs, published only weeks apart, Kazim Ali and Robert Boschman explore how their personal and family stories overlap with histories of violence, colonialism, indigenous dispossession, and energy development in Western Canada. In Fall 2021, Boschman and Ali sat down with Energy Humanities editors to discuss the resonances between their narratives and the themes that unite them. The conversation that followed was an intimate and affecting dialogue between two men wrestling with the past.
Helios is a new interview series about cutting edge EH research and the creative processes that bring it to life. Our third installment features Rebecca Sharp, a poet and playwright whose new collection, Rough Currency, explores our individual and collection entanglements with fossil fuels with an eye for the mythic and the magical.
Helios is a new interview series about cutting edge EH research and the creative processes that bring it to life. Our second installment features Anne Pasek, a Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture, and the Environment whose research aims to reshape our understanding of carbon, the Internet, and how humanities scholars think about and do research in a warming world.
Helios is a new interview series about cutting edge EH research and the creative processes that bring it to life. Our first installment features Simon Orpana, an artist and researcher from Hamilton, ON who turns sophisticated concepts and complex histories into arresting graphic narratives.
COVID-19 may be fueling flight from urban density that will undercut a green recovery. Caleb Wellum questions technocentric approaches to green recovery and explores the TVO series "The Life-Sized City" as a resource for thinking about how to renew city life.
The COVID-19 pandemic has grounded thousands of would-be travellers and forced the organizers of large conferences to rethink how to share knowledge and build professional networks. Energy Humanities researchers Anne Pasek, Emily Roehl, and Caleb Wellum argue that this turn of events is an opportunity to create more sustainable and equitable forms of knowledge exchange. In this white paper, they offer practical advice for conference organizers looking to experiment with low carbon e-conferencing.
Developed by the Transitions in Energy, Culture, and Society (TECS) project and the Petrocultures Research Group, energy humanities features commentary on current developments in energy and the environment, announcements and news items, and video interviews with influential and emerging voices on energy & society. This site gathers some of the most exciting and important insights humanities researchers provide about the social nature of our environmental crises.
