12 Min Read
June 6, 2025
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Carolin Slickers is currently a scholarship holder at the German-Italian Graduate School (Universität Bonn/ Università degli studi di Firenze, 2022-2025). She is also part of the German research network “Energy & Literature” and Junior Fellow at the research college “Imaginaries of Power” in Hamburg. Her research is focused on energy and infrastructural humanities and female literary history.
Energy is more than a topic
Energy is more than a topic. According to Imre Szeman, energy “should not be seen as simply another field to add, for example, to the environmental humanities… Yet, this characterises a great deal of what has gone under the name of energy humanities to date.”1 Academia separates disciplines, designates research areas, and defines methods. With the rise of energy as an academic concern, these mechanisms have produced energy humanities, as we find them in our curricula today, but in a form that, to some extent, seems institution-washed.
The Russian war on Ukraine shifted the focus in the academic landscape: Energy became, from one moment to the next, a matter of concern. Academic institutions across Europe reacted to the war, and energy as a topic flourished at universities. From my perspective as an early-career researcher in Germany, this new focus holds true in the sense that suddenly, research funds have been directed towards the institutionalization of energy as a topic in literary and cultural studies. While this is exciting for me—securing part of my academic future—I often come back to Szeman and his claim that, “The aim of the energy humanities was always greater than this,” and that their intention has been “to unnerve the continuing legibility of the study of history, politics, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies, as presently practiced." 2 However, these practices seem to rarely have been transformed or even touched through the new approach.
For a literary scholar, Szeman’s assertion is particularly alarming. In an afterword to Oil Fictions, an anthology of petrocultural literary studies, he expresses his concern that “All too quickly… energy has become yet another site or theme for the critical investigation of literature.”3 Accepting the critique, rather than reformulating it, raises the question of how to pursue the new sensibility about energy while striking a balance between theme and practice, especially in a literature that speaks in terms of “topics” most of the time. So, in the winter semester of 2023/24, a small group of students and I embarked on a journey into the literary history of energy to understand that energy is not a topic to be studied in itself but a path into literary studies.
What literature can do for energy humanities
As Dan Tamïr has argued, in times when “humans influence the fundamentals of an entire planet to the degree of modifying entire ecosystems, changing the Earth’s atmosphere and climate,” everything might be considered an object of human agency. He goes on to state even more clearly that “[I]f everything in our world is influenced by human action, then everything may be considered to be part of the humanities.”4 With this in mind, rather than teaching the literary history of energy as a passive mirror of the history of energy as such, we discussed how historical conceptions of energy and force have shaped the ways in which energy systems has been mutually dependant , institutionalized, and even harnessed. Examples of such institutionalization are seen in the vitalist fluids and the awakening “spark” of Frankenstein’s monster (and the imagery of its electric after-life), the visions of hell and of highly industrialized iron factories, or the ways in which we have come to dominate the material world through touch and voice simply because we have developed electrical devices to do so.
As Szeman notes, a key moment in the energy humanities is when we understand ourselves institutionally and personally “as subjects of energy.”5 In every topic section, the class approached this idea: Talking about crackling wood fires as prestige in Jane Austen’s time, we thought about our historical ability to use energy (heat) to become independent of our climatic predispositions——and about how this separation in turn creates vulnerability.6 We considered work ethics, heavily influenced by thermodynamics, as brilliantly discussed by Cara Daggett in her work Birth of Energy. We also addressed how the historical meaning of work influenced students’ ideas about productivity and exhaustion, which is reflected in an endless media debate about how Gen Z individuals are not willing to work themselves to death.7
Reading Italo Calvino’s short story “La pompa di benzina,” students discussed how dependent we are on mobility and recharging/fueling cycles—many students stated they had developed an anxiety of leaving their houses not knowing where and when they will be able to recharge their phones and laptops next. Moreover, students showed that even when they were aware of global injustices, they were not prepared to immerse themselves in the fictionalized conflicts (and associated violence) that Helon Habila unfolds around oil exploration in the Niger Delta in Oil on Water. Immersing the reader in historically and geographically diverse energy worlds is one of the defining features of literature in the project of energy humanities. Concluding the traditional literary section of the class with the entropic Californian solar farms of Angelika Meier’s Osmo, the course moved into its last thematic session thereafter: we left printed text and dived into the internet culture of solarpunk and its creative collective dynamics.
“It’s hard out here for futurists under 30”
This phrase from Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto indicates that institutions have reacted differently across faculties and nations to the climate movement since 2017.8 Certain American universities (e.g., Yale University) have shifted their interactions with students from working against climate denial (qua scientific evidence) to working against climate anxiety—which is difficult to do because the scientific data has not changed. In France, The Shift Project maps the range of responses in higher education on the energy transition, calling on France’s universities “to make sure that all educational programs are in line with this major national and global project.” In the UK, research projects such as “Eco Worrier, Eco Warrior” (Centre for Energy Ethics, University of St. Andrews) consider the emergence of eco-anxiety among young people, including among members of the generation we currently face in the classroom.
Solarpunk is described by Juan David Reina-Rozo as “a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that asks the question ‘what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?’”9 As such, solarpunk aesthetics build a space of “counter-cultural hope” in the face of climate anxiety and issues of climate injustices.10 Solarpunk draws heavily on the aesthetic and social integration of renewable energy systems, as solar, wind, and tidal energy becomes the driver of a post-fossil, post-capitalist society. The challenge is to engage with this transition by analyzing creative solutions, discussing shared ideas for the future, and considering where solarpunk ends and green-washed escapism begins. Whereas the former seeks to address current problems aesthetically, the latter establishes uncritical counter-worlds that are designed to be “green” but offers no awareness of the problem and therefore no answers for current questions such as: How will we live together with other species? How do we solve the issue of rising temperatures without relying on the “lazy trick” that technology will maintain our standard of living against the odds?
For a literary scholar, this challenge means looking at utopian or dystopian tales of sustainable or apocalyptic futures and finding their common denominator. When we read stories about salvation, what do we find are the roles—or rather responsibilities—assigned to us by these stories? What is at the core of post-carbon imaginaries, and what are the paths that these imaginaries take? On what kind of fictive (or historically identifiable) resources do these imaginaries draw? By engaging with the participatory creative dynamics of solarpunk internet culture, additional discipline-specific questions arise for literary studies. How can we (de)conceptualize authorship in this context? What characteristics do genres such as the short story offer that make them preferred forms of expression? Manifestos, for example, have a rich literary history (think of the imagists or futurists), so what do we make of the various solarpunk manifestos?
As a mid-semester assessment, students in my class were asked to write a short reflection on energy. The assignment intentionally left open the scope of the text to be written by students, who were free to address elements brought up in our previous sessions, point to scenarios of their everyday lives and the role of energy in their daily experiences, or simply be creative. Reading their writing was exciting for me. Many reflected on the video games and media they consumed (e.g., pointing at energy levels in mobile farming games or other minigames such as Harvest Moon or Coral Island). Others wrote about their everyday mobility and friction; and some even wrote short pieces of fiction, of which nearly all were situated in a solarpunk or solar utopic world. Most importantly, the fictional pieces students wrote discussed energy-related issues already encountered in our seminar (shelter, electricity and life, global inequalities, and figurations of work) by translating them into the solution-oriented language of solarpunk. Among all these texts, one competence became legible: the ability to identify historical, energy-related issues in fiction and re-engage with them.
Critical energy literacy
At the end of the course program, students completed a final survey whose main objective was to understand how and to what extent they had developed a critical energy literacy, i.e., the ability to identify how energy constitutes the modern world and analyze that world’s complexity. One section of the survey was focused on the students’ relationship to energy in their everyday lives. Here, less than a third of respondents said that they grew up or lived near an energy production site or experienced energy production as part of their environment. However, alienation from energy production did not stop the remaining two thirds from seeing energy as an essential part of life: students rated electricity higher in importance than heat or mobility as the first energy-related facet that came to their mind. Most students claimed to be capable of identifying whether their practices were energy-intensive or not (showing self-perception). But their interest in individually measurable energy consumption was low, the relationship to energy in everyday life appearing intuitive to this group (57%).
In another part of the survey, the general impact of the course on students’ energy awareness was assessed. All students indicated a significant change in this awareness; and these changes could be identified on three different levels. Conceptually, students expressed a more in-depth knowledge of energy physics (71%). This may seem surprising as a result of a literary studies seminar. However, it makes sense since learning about energy means learning that energy is more than a metaphor. Students also reported having a better understanding of the forms of resources and how these function in our societies (57%), as well as a better knowledge of the role of energy in human history and the history of modern societies (28%).
In methodological terms, students expressed a changed understanding of energy as a subject of the humanities. This shift includes the role of energy as a conceptual trajectory in many different theorems in the social and cultural sciences (see e.g. Bourdieu’s conversion of capital or Greenblatt’s “social energy”) and energy’s potential applications for new transdisciplinary practices that combine natural science objects and humanities’ methods. Many students indicated that energy is a subject that combines literary studies with a minor subject in their overall studies, be it philology or other cultural studies—among those, archaeology and religious studies—social sciences, or natural sciences. In response to an open question asking students to think about such disciplinary synergies, some gave surprising answers, for example pointing to energy as a religious concept and suggesting that energy humanities could also work in the context of religious studies.
In material terms, students stated that they could no longer “unsee” energy in their environment and that they now realized that the availability of energy is a privilege. In addition, they demonstrated sensitivity to energy intensive practices in academia and teaching, as they categorized the seminar’s energy intensity as “high” and even acknowledged their own role in energy consumption through their use of electronic devices and commute to and from campus. While students unanimously ranked the natural sciences as the most energy intensive disciplines, they estimated that the energy output of the social sciences and cultural studies was likewise high.
How energy-intensive is teaching energy humanities?
While some may assert that the humanities have “an energetic history of their own,” one student during the first session of the semester claimed that the humanities only relied on “books and thoughts.”11 These diverging statements illustrate how different (or not) ideas of energy intensity can be. Students often reduce the humanities to research conducted in libraries rather than laboratories. Written text is a formidable, sustainable resource, if it outlasts its amount of embodied energy.12 The collected work editions of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf likely present in any university library and used by many scholars over the years illustrate this point.
Assessing the quantitative and qualitative energy intensity of the seminar means looking at the different levels of academic practice involved. What are our (textual) resources? How do we access them? And what does our working infrastructure entail? With the advent of Open Access and digitization, a digital dimension was added to the humanities’ material-based resource intensity described above. Importantly, digitization is a multiplier that creates a vast difference between faculties, research fields, and ultimately national education systems.13 While digitization promises to level the playing field, the issue of (digital) access isolates institutions as much as individuals within academia. For instance, whether a university provides students with software licenses such as MS Office or Endnote influences the extent to which we can expect students to learn and work digitally and become digitally literate. Although many countries support the acceleration of Open Access publishing, there clearly remain some barriers. For the course, Vivasvan Soni’s chapter on “Energy” (three pages in total) was not available digitally at my university at the time, so the whole book had to be borrowed, transported, and scanned (and then returned) for us from another university.14
Most of the older canonical texts we used in class, such as Moby Dick or Emma, were accessible online. Students were given links to the full texts, while the excerpts discussed in the sessions were scanned from library editions. Distributing the scanned physical text allowed students and the instructor to literally be on the same page and provided additional standardized and qualified text material (e.g., editor’s notes and afterwords) to enrich the reading and discussion. More recent texts were either made available as scans, or the students were asked to purchase them. All digital teaching material was provided by the university’s own cloud-based service (e-campus).
When I reached out to the University of Bonn’s Data Centre (Hochschulrechenzentrum, or HRZ) to ask whether the course’s energy use could be estimated, I was told that “It is impossible to calculate the power consumption for a specific course with reasonable effort.” However, the HRZ team provided a working model for illustrative purposes.15 The e-campus uses 2,784 kWh when considering the storage requirement quota, 3,380 kWh when referring to its memory utilization rate, or 4,649 kWh when measuring the CPU utilization rate of the university’s overall information technology (IT) services’ energy usage for one semester. A suggested independent average value is 3,604 kWh, i.e., what a small wind farm with relatively moderate output produces.16 Finally, assuming that all courses are equally energy-intensive, one seminar uses 1.67 kWh per semester—as much as a standard electric kettle on a busy day (in use for a total of 45 min.). As with any digital infrastructure, there is a certain dynamic to these measurements: the storage data (how many texts are stored in the cloud) is less important than the issue of user access and storage infrastructure.
The individual workload—another imprint of how energy, its connection to performance, and the measuring thereof structure our everyday academic life—amounted to a total of 82 hours for the seminar. Assuming that all students used an electronic device with a standardized energy consumption, this would mean 4,1 kWh per student.17 Since it is likely that not all students spent exactly this amount of time in front of their laptops, this figure should only be taken as an estimate. Other energy or resource intensive practices include the use of a presentation screen, room lighting, printouts, and transportation. However, these are less measurable as they intervened differently during each meeting. Overall, there is a difference between the energy intensity that is palpable and that which is measurable.
Teaching energy humanities in literary studies
One of the key takeaways from this brief journey through literary energy history is that transparency should be understood on multiple levels. Indeed, teaching energy humanities requires being transparent about the modalities and affordances of teaching itself. It means making history and society visible to show where and how energy has defined our present. It also means creating an atmosphere of honesty in the classroom and making it clear that energy use is both one of the driving factors of climate change and a crucial feature of everyday life, while keeping in mind the inequalities in energy consumption and distribution.
Teaching energy humanities in literary studies is a different experience than teaching other courses in literary studies, as the non-literary world is never excluded from the classroom. In my course, classroom discussions were engaging from the beginning, but the more students developed a critical perspective on energy, the more rewarding these conversations became; this trend was evident both in the complexity of the discussions toward the end of the semester and in the final assignments. When asked for a final opinion on the course, several students described how they felt their biography reflected current developments in energy history; they listed fiction they had read without “seeing the energy in it” and wrote about how energy appeared in other theoretical (con)texts they were reading about for other courses. Some students, however, simply wrote in the typical laconic manner that these kinds of surveys sometimes produce: “It was fun.”
Thanks to Fabian Prante and the team of the HRZ Bonn.
Articles in this series
Introduction: Energy Humanities in Practice: Teaching, Technology, Transition
EH in Practice 1: Libraries and Laboratories: Teaching Energy Humanities in Literary Studies
EH in Practice 2: The World of Energy and The Myth of Containerization
EH in Practice 3: Museums and the Challenge of Cultural Decarbonization
EH in Practice 4: Preserving Oil: In Conversation with Educators at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum and Oil Museum of Canada
EH in Practice 5: Virtue Ethics and Ecosabotage
EH in Practice 6: The Rise and Fall of Energiewende: A Case Study in Horse Racing Syndrome
Notes
1. Imre Szeman, “Towards a Critical Theory of Energy,” in Energy Humanities: Current State and Future Directions, edited by Matúš Mišík and Nada Kujundžić (Springer Nature, 2021), 26–29.
2. What people do not like to talk about is that the academic system, despite all national differences, has become similar to what Peter Fleming calls the “Edu-Factory“(Fleming 36), where (economic or politic) relevance is key to academic survival. In particular, the humanities are fighting for their place in the academic landscape, as they are unlikely to bring home third-party funds. Jumping on the ““energy train” can thus also be a calculated decision in an effort to stay relevant in a system that rewards such calculation; Szeman, “Towards a Critical Theory of Energy,” 29.
3. Imre Szeman, “Afterword,” in Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere, edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021), 268.
4. Dan Tamïr, “Fats and Spirits: A Story of Modern Humanities’ Energy Dependence,” in Energy Humanities: Current State and Future Directions, edited by Matúš Mišík and Nada Kujundžić (Springer Nature, 2021), 38.
5. Szeman, “Towards a Critical Theory of Energy”, 26.
6. This one was not too subtle after Germany was kept in suspense over the course of the former winter by the idea of a heating crisis due to the Russian war on Ukraine.
7. This debate was quite heated during the time the seminar was offered because a study (pronovabkk) was published about Gen Z individuals and their willingness to call in sick compared to other age groups. An endless debate in columns and the feuilleton followed, some of those were unbearable to read (see e.g. Weidenfeld).
8. Adam Flynn, “Solarpunk: Notes toward a Manifesto,” Project Hieroglyph, https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/solar-manifesto
9. Juan David Reina-Rozo, “Art, Energy, and Technology: The Solarpunk Movement,” International Journal of Engineering, Social Justice and Peace 8, no. 1 (2021): 47, 54.
10. Ibid., 47.
11. Tamïr, “Fats and Spirits: A Story of Modern Humanities’ Energy Dependence”, 38.
12. In this case ““embodied energy” refers to the notion of “the total amount of energy used during the manufacture and life cycle of a product (esp. a building), considered as being notionally embodied in the product,” Oxford English Dictionary. Accessed June 20, 2024.
13. Miroslav Beblavý et al., Index of Readiness for Digital Lifelong Learning: Changing How Europeans Upgrade Their Skills, CEPS Report, 2009, https://www.ceps.eu/ceps-publications/index-readiness-digital-lifelong-learning (accessed June 20, 2024). Germany is a pitiful example of poor political decisions concerning internet infrastructure, having come “under scrutiny for under-investment in digital infrastructure.” Universities develop their own digitization strategies, which tend to be adapted unevenly among the faculties.
14. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), “What Is DFG’s Position Towards Open Access with Regard to Research Policy?” Strategy Paper (2018) and Position Paper (2022), https://www.dfg.de/en/research_funding/programmes/open_access (accessed June 20, 2024). For Germany, the Berlin Declaration from 2003 from the Federal Research Fund promotes this as a goal; Vivasvan Soni, “Energy,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman, Patricia Yaeger, and Jennifer Wenzel (Fordham University Press, 2017), 132–35.
15. These statistics are to be understood as a snapshot, as the energy usage is not constantly measured and the system is in a transitioning phase. All data accounts for the winter semester’s period from October 2023 to February 2024.
16. Compared for example to the Beleolico wind farm (Italy) whose average power rating was 3 MW in 2022 according to the Wind Europe report (p. 23). WindEurope. Wind Energy in Europe: 2022 Statistics and the Outlook for 2023-2027 | WindEurope. April 2, 2022. Accessed May 30, 2024.
17. “Stromverbrauch von PC, Laptop & Tablet,” co2online, https://www.co2online.de. Here 50 W/h is used as a benchmark for a standardized laptop.
