Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry, University College London
Biography
Dr. Gianfranco Selgas is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London (UCL). He received his PhD in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Stockholm University in 2022. Prior to joining UCL, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies (NILAS) at Stockholm University.
His research focuses on the political and cultural ecology of extractivism and energy in Latin America and the Caribbean, combining critical cultural theory, environmental history, and political ecology. He is currently completing his second book, which explores the geohistory of the commodification of nature, energy, and labor in twentieth-century Venezuela.
He is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group and a Guest Researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Sciences, and Engineering (SEED) in Sweden, where he collaborates on a project examining the politics of the low-emission energy transition. Before entering academia, he worked as a journalist in Caracas, Venezuela.
Selected publications
Selgas, G. 2025. “Mining.” Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy, edited by Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzell. West Virginia University Press. [In press]
Selgas, G. & Silva-Ferrer, M. 2025. “Energy Matters: Latin America and the Cultural Critique of Energy.” Environmental Humanities 17(1): 223-234. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-11543503. [In press]
Selgas, G. 2025. Regionalismo ensamblado: Cultura, ecología política y extractivismos en Latinoamérica (1930-1940). Iberoamericana Vervuert. https://doi.org/10.31819/9783968696430.
Rivarola Puntigliano, A. & Selgas, G. 2023. “Development under Scrutiny: Environment, Geopolitics and a Reimagination of Latin America.” Handbook on International Development and the Environment, edited by Benedicte Bull and Mariel Aguilar-Støen, 71-82. Edward Elgar Publishing.
