We are delighted to share details of Crude Representation: BP and the Cultural Imagination of Oil, an online seminar series that will run from February to April 2025. Each event will feature three speakers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. All events are free to attend. You can register to attend via Eventbrite.
Crude Representations Seminar 1: BP and Audio-Visual Culture
Wednesday 12 February 2025, 16:00 – 18:00, GMT
- Nariman Massoumi – Pouring Water on Troubled Oil
- Andrea Zarza Canova – Audible Oil: Sonic Postcards from BP Touring Service
- Annette Davison – Cosmopolitanism vs Coherence? Music and the Prestige Films of BP and Shell
Crude Representations Seminar 2: BP and Petrofiction
Wednesday 12 March 2025, 16:00 – 18:00, GMT
- Chao Ren – From Burmah Oil to BP: Colonial Oilfields and the Cultural Imagination of Capitalism
- Evelyn MacPherson – Covered by Oil: Ian Fleming and the Limits of the Oil Imaginary
- Michael Malouf – Those BP Settlements: Jurisdiction and Place in Tom Cooper’s The Marauders
Crude Representations Seminar 3: BP and Corporate Myth-Making
Wednesday 2 April 2025, 16:00 – 18:00, GMT
- Ian Wereley – Petro-Pedagogy: Teaching the History of Oil through the Archives of the British Petroleum Company
- Tobah Aukland-Peck – Petro-modernism: Artistic Commissions from BP and Shell
- Phoebe Lakin – Mythic extractions: commercializing Greco-Roman Antiquity in the Petroleum Industry
Crude Representations Seminar 4: BP and the Aesthetics of Labour
Wednesday 30th April 2025, 16:00 – 18:00, GMT
- Kaveh Ehsani – Reluctant Paternalism and the Cultural Politics of APOC in the post WWI era
- Scott Erich – Feet on the Seabed: BP and the Cinematic Narration of Abu Dhabi’s First Oil
- Raha Golestani – Oily Hands: Cultural Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran
