Petroforms is a work of petrocriticism (the critical study of oil and other fossil fuels) that thinks both broadly about encounters with oil in our petromodern world and specifically about how the enormously harmful impact of Nigerian oil production contorts and distorts various art forms that try to address it. It is a timely treatment of a commodity that shapes all our lives.
Helen Kapstein is a John Jay English professor who earned her PhD from Columbia University. Petroforms: Oil and the Shaping of Nigerian Aesthetics (2025) is her second book, part of the Energy & Society series from West Virginia University Press. Her work has appeared in venues ranging from Postcolonial Text and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment to Ms. magazine and The Conversation. She is a past president of the Cultural Studies Association.
