Stacey Balkan
Stacey Balkan is Associate Professor of Environmental Literature and Humanities at Florida Atlantic University where she also serves as an affiliate faculty member for the university’s Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation. Dr. Balkan’s teaching and research focus on Environmental Literature(s), Environmental/Energy Justice, Global South and Postcolonial Studies, Petrocultures & Petromodernity, Ecocriticism, and Speculative/Climate Fictions. As an activist-scholar working in the area of Energy Justice, Dr. Balkan’s recent work centers on the utility of speculative fiction for actualizing just energy futures. Accordingly, her recent monograph, Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India (West Virginia University Press, 2022) closes with a speculative venture into renewable futures in India’s “sunshine state”; she is a contributor to the collectively-authored volume Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice (Minneapolis, 2022), which likewise participates in the critical-utopian/world-making project of imagining just futures; and Stacey’s most recent essay, “Can Solarpunk Save the World” (Public Books, 2022) envisions a collective energy commons modelled on both radical “solarpunk” imaginaries as well as actually existing infrastructures in places ranging from Puerto Rico to Hawaii to Michigan. She is now completing an article for a special issue of PMLA on postcolonial climate fictions; and she has also penned essays for Revue Études Anglaises and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment on the energopoetic works of Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, and Paolo Bacigalupi. Dr. Balkan teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Climate Fiction as well as Introductory Courses to Literature and Environment, Energy Humanities, and Petrocultures with central emphases/curricular units on speculative fictions. Stacey’s publications also include Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere (Penn State Press, 2021) in addition to numerous journal articles for ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Energy Humanities, The Global South, Global South Studies, Mediations, and Social Text Online.
SF/F Related Courses:
- LIT4434: Literature and Environment
- LIT2010: Interpretation of Fiction: World-Making Through Climate Fiction
- ENG3822: Introduction to Literary Studies: Energy Humanities and Just Futures
- LIT6934: Reading Energy: After Petrocultures (Fall 2023)
Relevant Books:
Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India. Histories of Capitalism and the Environment Series. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2022.
Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice. Co-authored with After Oil Collective. Eds. Ayesha Vemuri and Darin Barney. Forerunners Series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
Relevant/Refereed Journal Articles:
“Envisioning a Planet of the (Urban) Commons: Solarity in the Late Anthropocene.” PMLA. Special Issue: “Postcolonial Climate Fiction.” Ed. Ashley Dawson. Forthcoming.
“Energo-poetics: Reading Energy in the Ages of Wood, Oil, and Wind. Revue Études Anglaises. Special Issue: “Being Fossil: Energy Humanities 2.0.” Ed. Pablo Mukherjee. 74.1 (2021): 12-33.
“Inhabiting the Chthulucene: Forging Tentacular Intimacies in ‘Edgy Times.’” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 6.4 (Autumn 2019): 843-863.
Relevant Essays &Amp; Speaking Engagements:
“Can Solarpunk Save the World?” Rev. of Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva, Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice by the After Oil Collective, and Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures edited by Christopher Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Norie Tamura, Rajat Chaudhuri, and Sarena Ulibarri. Public Books. 15 Nov. 2022.
(with Rhys Williams and Thomas Davis) “Politics after Academia, Part 1: Acts.” After Oil: Next. Podcast. Banff, AB (Canada). 22 Oct. 2022.
Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India. “Energy Aesthetics: Representing Lived Experiences of Oil.” Podcast. Georgetown University, Qatar. 31 Mar. 2022.
Relevant Presentations and Proceedings
Next: After Oil School 3.2. The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Banff, AB, Canada. Feb. 23-25, 2023.
“Moving Beyond Petrofiction: Narrating Green Transition.” Presider/presenter. MLA Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA. 2023.
Next: After Oil School 3. The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Banff, AB, Canada. Oct. 20-22, 2022.
“Envisioning a Planet of the (Urban) Commons: Solarity in the Late Anthropocene.” Petrocultures 2022. Stavanger, Norway.
“Solar Futures.” “Petromyopia 4: Looking Beyond.” Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) Annual Conference. Virtual. 2021.
Solarity: After Oil School 2. Canadian Centre for Architecture – Montreal QC, Canada. May 23-25, 2019.
