Oliver Aas, M.A.

Oliver Aas is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University and a Research Associate in the Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual Research Group at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. He holds a PhD from Cornell University and works at the intersection of environmental humanities, literary and media studies, and art history. His research examines the bi-pedal relationship between creative expression and large-scale social and ecological transformations across Anglophone, (Post-Soviet)/Baltic, and Scandinavian cultures.

His first book project, Arctic Forms: Literature, Art, Politics, explores the symbolic and imaginative significance of the Arctic within the Western imagination from the exploration era to the Anthropocene. Eschewing the “awareness-raising” tendencies of traditional eco-criticism, Olivers’ work instead investigates how the literary and visual arts offer distinctive aesthetic and speculative models for engaging with that which cannot be fully known or represented—phenomena that exceed human frames of reference, such as circumpolar melting.

Together with Hana Gründler, he is also developing a new project titled Genealogies of Inactivity in Eastern Europe, 1945–, which rethinks inactivity as a mode of political engagement. The project explores how artists and writers working under political duress employed various forms of withdrawal, refusal, and inaction as acts of protest.

An interdisciplinarian, Oliver has published on a wide range of topics, from schlager music and the role of narrative in green transition debates to the intersections of digital art and war. His research has been supported by competitive grants from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS), the Interdisciplinary Center for Baltic Sea Region Studies (IFZO), the KHI, and the Mellon Foundation, among others.