The first Centre for Environmental Humanities talk of TB2 2023/2024. Dr Mattin Biglari will be speaking on his research: 'The Coloniality of Oil in Iran: BP, Epistemic Struggle, and Environmental Justice' in the Humanities Research Space, Woodland Road, 24 January at 3pm.

Mattin Biglari is a Lecturer in Asian and Middle Eastern Environmental History at the University of Bristol. His forthcoming monograph, coming out with Edinburgh University Press, is titled Nationalising Oil & Knowledge in Iran: Labour, Decolonisation and Colonial Modernity, 1933-51. Engaging with STS, subaltern studies, global labour history, environmental history, and the energy humanities, it argues that Iran’s oil nationalisation in 1951 stemmed from years of mundane struggles relating to technopolitics in the city of Abadan. It illuminates how anti-colonialism, infrastructural politics, and labour activism coalesced in opposition to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as BP), and how this process culminated in the reproduction of colonial epistemologies, separating the technology and politics of oil. His current research focuses on the proliferation of oil refining across the Indian Ocean and its relationship to decolonisation, environmental justice, and the 'Great Acceleration’, especially in relation to pollution & toxicity.