Research

Infrastructure, Energy & Environment

This cluster interrogates contemporary infrastructural crises, from issues of energy poverty and food sustainability to arts infrastructure and labour politics.

Staff

Publications

2025

Campbell, A., Diamanti, J. (2025) Supply chain criticism: seam, interval, hold. Social Science Information, 64, pp. 508-527. (doi: 10.1177/05390184251403362)

Ivry, H. (2025) Listening to infrastructure: acoustic circulation and Black resistance. Errant Bodies Press

Pitt Scott, H. (2025) The promise of electrification. Energy Humanities,

Friedman, G., Ivry, H., Stilley, H. (2025) “Introduction: Insurgent infrastructures and infrastructures of insurgency” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 66, pp. 197-204. (doi: 10.1080/00111619.2024.2427035)

Williams, R. (2025) Habit: What kinds of friction can disrupt the status quo? West Virginia University Press

Ivry, H. (2025) Forms of death and the death of form in contemporary Black fiction. Studies in the Novel, 57, pp. 102-118. (doi: 10.1353/sdn.2025.a952393)

Pitt Scott, H. (2025) Financial Petroleum Cultures: Narrating Volatile Futures, 1973–2050. Palgrave Macmillan

2024

Ivry, H., Karpinski, M. (2024) Alien rhythms: sounding black futures from the ocean floor. Palgrave Macmillan

Williams, R. (2024) Energy humanities. Routledge

Pitt Scott, H. (2024) Figures of separation: cognitive mapping and oil’s declining slope. Representations, 166, pp. 62-85. (doi: 10.1525/rep.2024.166.3.62)

Ivry, H. (2024) How to listen otherwise: Black sounds, Black ecologies. English Language Notes, 62, pp. 13-29. (doi: 10.1215/00138282-11096323)

Ivry, H. (2024) Insurgency, history, and infrastructure in Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift and Imbole Mbue's How Beautiful We Were. Contemporary Literature, 64, pp. 149-181. (doi: 10.3368/cl.64.2.149)

2023

Williams, R. (2023) Contemporary utopianism: an island renaissance. Oxford University Press

Williams, R. (2023) Solar as narrative element: the interrupting surface. Punctum Books

Campbell, A., Carter, F. (2023) Saboteurial poetics: blockades, machine-breaking, & infrastructure from below. Routledge

Ivry, H. (2023) Ecologies from the cargo: Zora Neale Hurston and the long Anthropocene. Modern Fiction Studies, 69, pp. 444-465. (doi: 10.1353/mfs.2023.a905745)

Pitt Scott, H. (2023) Leveraged futurity: markets and militants in the transition. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, (doi: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2215791)

Ivry, H. (2023) Transscalar Critique: Climate, Blackness, Crisis. Edinburgh University Press

Ivry, H., Karpinski, M. (2023) Blackness after the end of the world: Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s dub ecologies. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, 30, pp. 77-101. (doi: 10.1093/isle/isaa174)

2021

Ivry, H. (2021) ‘Improbable metaphor’: Jesmyn Ward’s asymmetrical Anthropocene. European Review, 29, pp. 383-396. (doi: 10.1017/S1062798720000708)

Ivry, H. (2021) Writing in the “second person plural”: Ben Lerner, ambient esthetics, and problems of scale. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62, pp. 123-136. (doi: 10.1080/00111619.2020.1787321)

Williams, R. (2021) Turning toward the Sun: the solarity and singularity of New Food. South Atlantic Quarterly, 120, pp. 151-162. (doi: 10.1215/00382876-8795791)

Ivry, H. (2021) The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King. University of Toronto Quarterly, 90, pp. 406-408. (doi: 10.3138/utq.90.3.hr.18)

2016

Williams, R. (2016) Utopian curatorial praxis: on Slow Action by Ben Rivers. Science Fiction Film and Television, 9, pp. 118-121. (doi: 10.3828/sfftv.2016.4)

Williams, R. (2016) There’s power in the dirt: impurity, utopianism and radical politics. Routledge

Williams, R. (2016) Utopia’s the thing: an analysis of utopian programme and impulse in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau. Palgrave Macmillan

Williams, R. (2016) Weird counsels: the critic and the critics. Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 124, pp. 92-98.

Postgraduate research students

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The work of this fast-growing research cluster originates in the 2019-2020 ArtsLab initiative, Energy and Ecology which has since expanded into the UK’s first dedicated research group for the infrastructure humanities.

Much of the School’s activity in this area is delivered through the Infrastructure Humanities Group , an interdisciplinary research community of scholars from across the University who are invested in interrogating contemporary infrastructural crises from issues of energy poverty and food sustainability to local arts infrastructure and transnational labour politics.Members of this cluster are interested in how the methodologies and analytical frameworks of the humanities can address the material needs of diverse partners – from community to policy to industry – and make legible otherwise unavailable forms of collective agency and ways of knowing.

The cluster has an active events programme with monthly public reading groups, work in progress sessions, practitioner-led programming and open talks. For the current schedule please see our events page