Sean Singh Matharoo is a transdisciplinary scholar of French- and English-language speculative literature, media, and philosophy, which he studies in the contexts of postcolonial studies, the energy humanities, and performance studies. As an alumnus of the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity, he is updating his doctoral thesis into a book, which is provisionally titled Solar Energology: Reading the Damned Poetics of a Dying Earth. Matharoo’s research responds to the Anthropocenic energy crisis and the need to transition to alternative energy sources by studying how literature, media, and philosophy contribute to the decolonization of petroculture by impelling us to find, in language, the gift of solar-powered futures. Important to this project is a theoretical framework whose possibility conditions include: 1) Alexandre Kojève’s later concept of “energology,” or the study of the mediation between the dialectic of ontology and phenomenology; 2) Georges Bataille’s solar economy; 3) Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology; and, 4) the vitalist-structuralist pluralism of francophone Belgian science-fiction author J.-H. Rosny aîné’s Les sciences et le pluralisme (1922), which he is translating into English.

Matharoo is also a noise musician whose collaborative pieces about the environment may be understood to problematize the presupposition of colonial-racial divisions in thinking and being.

He is Book Review Assistant Editor for Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, a lab affiliate with Energy Lab Today at Georgia Tech, and is a partner/collaborator with Vision Inclusive.