Heisenberg Fellow, Institute of European Ethnology and Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems, Humboldt University, Berlin
Biography
Gretchen Bakke is an anthropologist and writer, a student of electricity and thinker in, with, and about language. She currently holds a Heisenberg Position split between the Institute for European Ethnology (IfEE) and the Institute for Human-Environment Transitions (IRI THESys) at Humboldt University, Berlin. She wrote The Grid (2016) for a general public, with the aim of bringing anthropological sensibilities to a study of the immense infrastructural, historical, technological, legislative, and fiscal complexity of the US electric grid in radical transformation; and the ebullient ethnography The Likeness: Semblance and Self in Slovene Society (2020) which argues ferociously and with great delight against the depth model of subjectivity. She is currently conducting research on the slow withdrawal of of oil and gas from the North Sea, with research in the Shetland Islands, Aberdeen and off-shore. She is the co-editor, with Marina Peterson, of Errant Elements — a chapbook series based on the Periodic Table of the Elements.
Selected publications
2025, “To Transact and Shimmer: Energy in the Expanded Field,” Annual Review of Anthropology 54, On-line 14 July, 2025 (Print forthcoming, October)
2021, “Pivoting toward Energy Transition 2.0: Learning from Electricity,” Research Handbook on Energy and Society, Webb, Tingey, and Wade eds., Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar Publishing: 98-111.
2020, The Likeness: Semblance and Self in Slovene Society. University of California Press.
2019, “Electricity is not a Noun,” Electrifying Anthropology: Explorations in Electric Practices and Infrastructures, Abram, Yarrow and Winthereik eds. New York: Bloomsbury: 25-42.
2016, The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between America and Our Energy Future.
