Biography
Michael Tondre joined the English department after completing his graduate work at
Oxford University (M.Phil, 2003) and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ph.D.,
2010). He is the author of The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender (Virginia, Victorian Literature and Culture series, 2018) and Oil (Bloomsbury, Object Lessons series, 2024). He has produced the first scholarly edition
of Upton Sinclair's Oil! (Penguin Classics, 2023) and is editing a special issue of Victorian Review on historical energy regimes. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, New Literary History, ELH, Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century
Literature, Victorian Review, Dickens Studies Annual, and The Paris Review.
Tondre’s current research addresses global energy cultures, with attention to the
shaping force of literature in petroleum’s earliest extraction, circulation, and consumption
across the north-south hemispheric divide. He is completing Refinement: Oil, Literature, and the British Atlantic World, 1850-1930, abridged sections from which have won the Schachterle Essay Prize (from the Society
for Literature, Science, and the Arts) and the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association
Article Prize. Situated at the nexus of the energy humanities and postcolonial critique, Refinement asks how doctrines about aesthetic cultivation and l’art pour l’art animated sovereign fantasies of petroleum power, and vice versa, in the era heralding
the dawn of oil culture. Prof. Tondre serves on MLA's Victorian forum committee and
has taught recent courses on the industrial literature of climate, global histories
of energy and the environment, British aestheticism and decadence, imperial imaginaries,
Afrofuturism, and new and pre-modern materialisms.
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