Stephanie LeMenager situates herself in the overlapping fields of American Studies and environmental criticism. Her books include an essay collection Century Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First (2012, co-edited with Teresa Shewry and Ken Hiltner),Manifest and Other Destinies (2005), and her newly released Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the AmericanCentury (2014). In her words, “Living Oil reaches outside the United States, to Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Azerbaijan, but its North American case studies allow for historically ‘deep’ criticism of literary and popular culture, in addition to ethnographic forays where I make brief appearances as a character in the book, interacting with other moderns who, like myself, are enmeshed in oil.” This talk recorded and posted to itunesU as an in-kind contribution to the MLG 2014 Institute on Culture and Society.