Book Talk: Petroforms by Dr. Helen Kapstein

Author Bio

Helen Kapstein is a Professor in the English Department at John Jay College, The City University of New York. She earned her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. (2025) is her second book, part of the Energy & Society series from West Virginia University Press. Her work has appeared in venues ranging from Postcolonial Text and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment to Ms. magazine and The Conversation. She is a Past President of the Cultural Studies Association.

Book Summary

is a work of petrocriticism (the critical study of oil and other fossil fuels) which thinks both broadly about encounters with oil in our petromodern world and specifically about how the enormously harmful impact of Nigerian oil production contorts and distorts various art forms that try to address it. It is a timely treatment of a commodity that shapes all our lives.

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