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

May 25, 2021

Brent Ryan Bellamy

Brent Ryan Bellamy explores what it means to do fieldwork in the energy humanities classroom and reflects on how an "oil inventory" assignment can reorient how students see literature, themselves, and the world.

Read
May 15, 2026

I.K. Allen

I.K. Allen asks what happens when universities take fossil fuel money while cutting the humanities. Allen argues that these shifts belong to the same political moment. Oil and gas funding continues to move into universities through research centres, partnerships, STEM programs, and private donations. At the same time, humanities departments are being closed, defunded, and pushed into casual labour. Allen calls this “petro-precarity”: the hollowing out of the fields that help us understand fossil capitalism, climate crisis, racism, gender, labour, and the rise of the far right.

Read
all articles