Off the Road: A Podcast about the Environmental Humanities

What does poetry have to do with driving? And what insights can poetry from the driver’s seat provide about our environmental crisis?

In this episode, Jannis talks with a former colleague of his, Joel Duncan, author of the recently published Poetic Drive (University of Virginia Press, 2025), about the surprising connections between American poetry and the automobile. From the everyday experience of driving to race, transpoetics, and the environmental costs of fossil-fueled mobility, Joel explains how poetry about cars is especially suited to reveal the ways in which cars produce and reproduce social and environmental inequalities.

We ask why reading...

Roads seem to be perfect and visceral examples of infrastructures that enable people: to move, to feel alive, to be free. What happens, however, when the realities of borders, colonial histories, and environmental exposure interrupt that promise?

In this episode, we’re joined by Nadia Butt, professor of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University Frankfurt, to dive deeper into the stories, infrastructures, and environments that shape the imagination of travel and migration. Drawing on Nadia’s research into South Asian automobility as well as travel and migration narratives, we consider how cultural and geographic contexts determine what mobility means and...

How do we read for energy? How can reading save the planet?

In this episode, Jannis speaks about such questions with the brilliant Jennifer Wenzel, who is not only professor of English and Comparative Literature and professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, but also a leading scholar and founding voice in the energy humanities. Drawing on her groundbreaking work, Jennifer invites us to think about the often-hidden connections between energy, culture, and the planet.

In this conversation, Jennifer recounts the creation of the energy humanities and explains how energy, and oil especially, has influenced...

When we think about the environment, we often picture oceans, forests, and other green places. But what if literature, hip hop, and even the history of the automobile have just as much to teach us about the environment?

In this episode, we sit down with Timo Müller, professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz and researcher specializing in modernism, the environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and African American studies. From modernist literature to climate change, from American road trips to hip hop lyrics, Timo explains why "the environment" is far more than the landscape around us—it's also a story...