Undergraduate Fellow
Lia Iannarilli is interested in interdisciplinary research that combines her interests in political science, human geography, and literary analysis. She has worked as an English research assistant for the John Galt project and Jackman Scholars-in-Residence program, alongside conducting a politically-focused examination of media representation as a Laidlaw scholar. Her most recent project, through an ROP, investigates the afterlives and impacts of mine closure. She hopes to pursue an academic career exploring how representation, power, and identity converge across political and literary mediums.
Fellowship Project: Pipe Dreams: Petro-Masculinity, Fossil Fiction, and Cultural Dystopias of Canadian Extractivism
Canada’s ongoing fossil fuel dependence produces and supports petro-masculinity, which idealizes extractive frontiers as utopias of opportunity for men. Yet this fantasy rests on the legitimization of colonial exploitation, ecological degradation, and gendered violence for communities in extractive sacrifice zones. Focusing on oil-encounters in Canadian literature, like Kate Beaton’s graphic novel Ducks (2022), this project examines how petrofictions critique and construct petro-masculinity as a dystopian cultural formation. It seeks to understand how literature, reflecting shared imaginaries, reveals dystopia not as a future threat, but as a present condition beneath us, in the underbelly of Canada’s enduring petrocultural fantasy.