Helios 3: Rebecca Sharp's Rough Currency

12 Min Read

August 23, 2021

Helios is an EH interview series about new research in the energy humanities and the creative processes that bring it to life.

Our third installment features Scottish poet and playwright Rebecca Sharp, whose interdisciplinary work explores ideas of landscape and place across artforms. In her new poetry pamphlet, Rough Currency, Sharp plumbs our personal and collective entanglements with fossil fuels with an eye for the mythic and the magical. A selection of her work is featured in The Art of Energy exhibition at the Centre for Energy Ethics, where it won second prize in the inaugural Art of Energy Award.

EH editors Imre Szeman and Caleb Wellum sat down with Rebecca over Zoom on June 25 to talk about her poetic process during a pandemic, why she wanted to write about oil, and how poetry can help us to see the world differently so that we might change it.

Click the download link below to read the full interview.

Download the interview
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Read More

August 9, 2021

Darren Fleet

What does religion have to do with climate change? For writer and artist Darren Fleet, the wildfires raging across Western Canada evoke the shared vocabulary of religion and climate change politics, and the urgent need to think seriously about the 'spiritual work' of energy transition and energy justice.

Read
June 6, 2025

Hélène Ducros & Nicholas Ostrum

This series introduction situates energy humanities in a rapidly changing global context marked by war, climate disasters, political backlash, and stalled transitions. Revisiting the foundational claims of Szeman and Boyer’s Energy Humanities (2017), Hélène Ducros and Nicholas Ostrum argue that technology functions both as infrastructure and as ideology, shaping how energy systems have come to structure modern life. The essays that follow examine how energy informs culture, pedagogy, politics, and ethics, and how new ways of thinking might point toward more just and sustainable futures.

Read
all articles