"Oil and Water Don’t Mix: Energy, Infrastructure, and the Great Lakes"
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Downtown Conference Center
161 West Wisconsin Avenue
Room 7820
Milwaukee, WI
United States
This event, part of the 19th International Willa Cather Seminar, is free and open to the public.
The Straits of Mackinac is the meeting place of two Great Lakes: Michigan and Huron. It is also home to a seventy year-old crude oil pipeline, which over the past decade has become a key site of environmental and climate activism in the Midwest. How can humanistic methods and approaches help us reckon with the energy past and future in a time of planetary crisis? This talk brings insights from the Energy Humanities and Infrastructure Studies to bear upon the pipeline controversy, as well as provide a new lens with which to consider Cather's Professor.
The views expressed in international seminar programs do not necessarily reflect the views of the Willa Cather Foundation.
Jeffrey Insko
Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, where he teaches courses on nineteenth-century American literature and culture and the Environmental and Energy Humanities. He is the author of History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (Oxford, 2018) and the editor of the Norton Library Edition of Moby-Dick (2024). His recent work on energy, environment, and infrastructure has appeared in such venues as the Cambridge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, the Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Post45, and The Dial. He is currently completing a book about energy infrastructure, the Great Lakes, and industrial modernity titled The North 30: An Environmental History of America’s Most Dangerous Pipeline.