Carolin Slickers, M.A.
Curriculum
Carolin Slickers is currently a PhD candidate and scholarship holder at the German-Italian Graduate School (University of Bonn, Università degli Studi di Firenze). She studied Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn, the Sorbonne Paris IV and the University of St Andrews. Her thesis, entitled Infinite Infrastructures: Oil’s Spatial Relationships in 20th century (European) Fiction investigates the literary spatial imaginaries in European Petrofiction. Her research is focused on Energy and Infrastructural Humanities, Gender Studies, and feminist literary history. She is spart of the DFG-funded research network „Literature and Energy“.
Publications (selection)
- Reading Energy: Literatur(-Wissenschaft) im Feld der ›Energy Humanities‹, in: Literatur und Zukunft. Beiträge zum Studierendenkongress Komparatistik 2022, ed. by Lara Ehlis, Berlin: Christian A. Bachmann, 2024, pp. 113–128.
- Of Libraries and Laboratories. Teaching Energy Humanities in Literary Studies, in: Europe Now (59) 2024 [forthcoming].
Research project: Infinite Infrastructures: Oil's Spatial Relationships in 20th Century Literary Fiction
The research project investigates petroleum infrastructures in 20th century petrofiction and draws on the findings of the spatial turn and the research areas of petrocultures and infrastructural humanities. It assumes and discusses a potential (temporal and spatial) endlessness inscribed in the petroleum complex: as infinite infrastructures, literary petroleum complexes transgress geographical and geological boundaries. The study’s body of text is composed of narrative fiction from Austria (Othmar Franz Lang’s Männer und Erdöl), Italy (Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Petrolio, Italo Calvino’s La pompa di benzina), the GDR (Kurt Barthel’s Terra Incognita), Scotland/UK (George Brown MacKay’s Greenvoe, Al Alvarez’ Offshore) und the french-speaking world (Sandrine Bessora’s Petroleum, Jean Rolin’s Ormuz).
Petrofiction and the entire context of energy literature call our readings and instruments into question, as well as our understanding of what literature is and what it does. In line with the semester's thematic focus on ‘resistance,’ the project traces various constellations of representative, aesthetic, and epistemological resistance of petroleum.