Imre Szeman (born 26 July 1968) is a Canadian cultural theorist, professor, and public intellectual. He is Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Szeman was previously University Research Chair of Environmental Communication at the University of Waterloo(2017-2022), Canada Research Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta (2009-2016), and Senator William McMaster Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. In 2020, Szeman was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2022, he was the Leverhulme Visiting Professor in Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. From 2021-2022, Szeman served as the Climate Critic for the Green Party of Canada.
In the final Forum on Fossil Capital essay, Imre Szeman explores how the current solar transition complicates Malm's conclusions about the possibility for energy transition under capitalism, noting the emergence of a new ideology: "solar fetishism."
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.
The Liberal government's recent Throne Speech made grand environmental policy pronouncements. Imre Szeman finds fault with the Liberal's haphazard approach and questions their continued commitment to resource extraction.
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.
