In June 2012, IAS Visiting Fellow Professor Imre Szeman delivered a Public Lecture titled "How to Think about Oil".

Chair: Dr Graeme Macdonald.

Imre Szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the recipient of the John Polanyi Prize in Literature (2000), the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award (2003), the Scotiabank-AUCC Award for Excellence in Internationalization (2004), an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2005-7), and the President’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision at McMaster University (2008), among other awards. He is the founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies and a founding member of the US Cultural Studies Association. Szeman is co-editor of Reviews in Cultural Theory and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Mediations and was a commissioning editor from 2003-10 for Cultural Spaces, a monograph series that explores the rapidly changing temporal, spatial, and theoretical boundaries of contemporary cultural studies.

This talk emerges from material Professor Szeman is currently working on. The thrust of the lecture will address the following question: what socio-theoretical problems does the crisis of oil raise (problems that have nothing to do, in fact, with the raw stuff of petro-carbons)? This event will offer a general overview of ‘why’ oil is such a crucial global and local issue, and explain why someone studying culture should have an interest in this subject.

The lecture will be podcast and broadcast in Warwick ITunes U.