What are you working on at the moment? How does it relate to Eco-Emotions?
Together with screen studies scholar Julia Leyda at NTNU I am currently editing a volume on oil cultures and translation, which will be included in the Routledge Environmental Humanities series by the end of this year. The book is a product of the Translatability of Oil project and not primarily about emotions. Yet affections for the environment are thematized in many of the contributions. For instance, we have translated short stories from Iran and the United Arab Emirates where feelings of loss and grief are dominant. In the Norwegian essays on the North Sea oil adventure, both guilt and pride are much to the fore. The most salient sentiment in the Norwegian texts, however, is nostalgia. Ecocritics tend to frame this emotion as problematic as it can be an obstacle for climate action, but in my own research I am intrigued by the transformation potential stemming from nostalgia.
What activity or aspect of Eco-Emotions are you most excited about?
I enjoy being in an interdisciplinary team with so many languages represented, both in the group as such and in terms of the variety of literatures we are analyzing. This means that we can be quite nerdy about philological issues in our meetings. It is really fascinating how languages and world views are connected.
What do you currently read for pleasure?
In my job the difference between business and pleasure is hard to tell, but for the moment I am reading Ben Smith’s 2019 novel Doggerland, which is about a rusting wind farm in the North Sea set in a bleak climate-changed future. The main characters are two men responsible for doing maintenance work on crumbling turbines producing less and less electricity, and the men’s constant range anxiety and worries about supplies generate a special form of claustrophobia in the text. It may sound like a boring read to some, but aesthetically I find it very interesting how Smith manages to create this closed system in the middle of an endless sea. His lyrical prose is a beautiful expression of grieving on many scales. The escape routes seem to be more temporal than spatial. There are also mysteries to unravel, which keep the reader alert.