Josephine Taylor – The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy

Josephine Taylor, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin (Ireland), discussed her book The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy: Multispecies Encounters in Extraction Zones (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) in the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series on Monday, 16 March 2026.

This book brings the emerging field of petrocultures and energy humanities discourse into conversation with the field of animal studies. Taylor examines how fossil fuels have frequently been described as the lifeblood of capitalist modernity, making petroleum appear as something intrinsic to human life. Through examining works such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, this book highlights the commodification of nonhuman life in the history of energy and, paradoxically, how these nonhuman actors have been unacknowledged and silenced through time.