Matthew T. Huber

Associate Professor, Geography

Contact Information
mthuber@maxwell.syr.edu

522 Eggers Hall
(315) 443-3845

Director of Graduate Studies, Geography

Degree

Ph.D., Clark University, 2009

Specialties

Political economy, historical geography, energy and capitalism, climate politics, resource governance and social theory

Publications

Books:

Climate Antagonism: Class Strategy for a Warming Planet (In progress and under contract from Verso Books).

2013. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).

Public Writing:

• Blogging intermittently on medium.com.
• “Bernie is the best chance we have on climate”Jacobin, 22 July 2019.
• “Ecosocialism: Dystopian and Scientific”Socialist Forum (Winter 2019 issue on Climate Change)
• “A Class Struggle Strategy for A Green New Deal” (with Jeremy Gong, Keith Brower Brown and Jamie Munro) Socialist Forum (Winter 2019 issue on Climate Change)
• “Climate and contradiction in Marx’s theory of history”Marxist Sociology Blog 6 February 2019.
• “Building a “Green New Deal”: Lessons from the Original New Deal”Verso Books Blog, 19 November 2018.
• “5 Principles of Socialist Climate Politics”The Trouble, 16 August 2018.
• “A Climate policy for the people”American Prospect 16 November 2017.
• “Whose carbon footprint matters?”Toxic News, August 7^th, 2017
• “Syracuse University professor condemns Koch foundation investment”  December 4^th, 2016 The Daily Orange
• “The carbon tax is doomed”Jacobin (online), October 9^th, 2016
• “Elon Musk saves the world?”Jacobin (online) May 12^th, 2015
•  “Too much oil”Jacobin (online) March 22^nd, 2015
•  “Syracuse University adjunct faculty call for better pay, working conditions (Commentary)”Syaracuse.Com/The Post-Standard, February 24^th, 2015

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles and Book Chapters:

2019. Ecological politics for the working class. Catalyst 3(1): 7-45 (online here).

2019. Radical paradoxes: The making of Antipode at Clark University. In, Trevor Barnes and Eric Sheppard, Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond (London: Wiley), 87-113.

2019. Resource geography II: What makes resources political? Progress in Human Geography 43(3):  553-564

2018. Resource geography I: Valuing nature (or not) Progress in Human Geography 42(1): 148-159

2018. “Fossilized liberation: Energy, freedom, and the ‘development of the productive forces’” In, Materialism and the Critique of Energy, Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti (editors). Chicago: MCM’ Press, 501-524.

2018. “Geography” for The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, Andrew Pendakis, Imre Szeman, Jeff Diamanti (eds).

2017. Reinvigorating Class in Political Ecology: Nitrogen capital and the means of degradation. Geoforum 85: 345-352 (special issue on “Political Industrial Ecology”)

2017. “Hidden abodes: Industrializing political ecology” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 107(1): 151-166                     

2017. “Value, nature and labor: A defense of Marx” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 28(1): 39-52

2017. “We can’t be dependent on anybody”: The rhetoric of “energy independence” and the legitimation of fracking in Pennsylvania. Extractive Industries and Society 4(2): 337-343 (with Carlo Sica)

2017 Beyond the subterranean energy regime? Fuel, land-use, and the production of space Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (with James McCarthy) 42(4): 655-668

2017. “Chemical dialectics” in “Chemical Geographies” (special compendium essay with Adam Romero, Julie Guthman, Ryan Galt, Becky Mansfield, and Suzana Sawyer) Geohumanities 3(1): 165-166; 158-177

2017. “Petro-capitalism”, Wiley-AAG International Encyclopedia of Geography, edited by Doug Richardson, et al.

2017. “Political Economy of Environment and Resources” Wiley-AAGInternational Encyclopedia of Geography, edited by Doug Richardson, et al.

2016. “Teaching Energy Geography? It’s complicated” Journal of Geography and Higher Education, 40(1): 77-83; Special Issue on Teaching Energy Geography.

2016. “Neoliberal energies: Crisis, governance and hegemony” In, The Handbook of Neoliberalism Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy (eds). London: Routledge, 479-488.

2015. “Theorizing energy geographies” Geography Compass 9(6): 27-38.

2015. Author response, “Lifeblood Book Forum” Cultural Geographies 22 (4): 750-754.

2015. “Energy and Social Power: From Political Ecology to the Ecology of Politics” In, The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology, edited by Tom Perreault, James McCarthy, and Gavin Bridge (London: Routledge), 481-492.

2015. “Oil for Life: The Bureau of Mines and the Biopolitics of the Petroleum Market,” Subterranean Estates: Lifeworlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 31-44. 

2013. Fueling Capitalism: Oil, the regulation approach, and the ecology of capital. Economic Geography 89(2): 171-194.

2013. Apocalypse, the radical left and the post-political condition. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (with Mazen Labban and David Correia)

2013. The urban imaginary of nature: Cities in environmental politics, Urban Politics: Critical Approaches, edtied by Deborah Martin and Mark Davidson (Sage), 204-220.

2012. Refined politics: Petroleum products, neoliberalism, and the ecology of entrepreneurial life. Journal of American Studies 46 (2): 295-312 (special issue on “oil cultures”)

2012. Energy, environment and the geopolitical imagination. Political Geography 31 (6): 402-403 (invited review essay)

2011. Enforcing scarcity: Oil, violence and the making of the market. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101 (4): 816-826 (special issue on energy).

2011. Intervention: Gusher in the Gulf and the despotism of capital. Antipode 43(2): 195-198 (editorial on the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill).

2011. Oil, life and the fetishism of geopolitics. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.22(3): 32-48.

2011. Extracting sovereignty: Capital, territory, and gold mining in Tanzania. Political Geography 30(2): 70-79 (with Jody Emel and Madoshi Makene).

2011. The richest hole on earth? Labor, nature and the politics of metabolism at the Bingham Canyon copper mine. In Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects, S.D. Brunn, A. Wood (eds.), 353-366 (with Jody Emel). 

2010. Circuits of capital. In B. Warf (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Geography, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 

2010. Human ecology and energy. In B. Warf (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Geography, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

2010.  Hyphenated geographies: The deindustrialization of nature-society geography. Geographical Review 100 (1): 74-89. 

2009. The use of gasoline: Value, oil, and the “American way of life.” Antipode 41 (3): 465-486.  

2009. Energizing historical materialism: Fossil fuels, space and the capitalist mode of production. Geoforum 40(1): 105-115. 

2009. Fixed minerals, scalar politics: The weight of scale in conflicts over ‘the 1872 Mining Act’ in the United States. Environment and Planning A 41 (2): 371-88 (with Jody Emel). 

2008. From lifeblood to addiction: Oil, space, and the wage-relation in petro-capitalist USA. Human Geography 1(2): 42-45. 

2008. A risky business: Mining, rent and the neoliberalization of “risk.” Geoforum 39 (3): 1393-1407 (with Jody Emel). 

2007. The urbanization of an idea: Imagining nature through urban growth boundary policy in Portland, OR, USA. Urban Geography 28(8): 705-731 (with Timothy Currie). 

2007. Global environmental standards for industry. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 32: 295-316 (with David Angel and Trina Hamilton).

Research Grants and Awards

2014. National Science Foundation, Geography and Spatial Sciences, $192,777.00 “The Nitrogen Fertilizer Industry: Integrating Industrial Ecology and Political Ecology Approaches”.

2014. James Blaut Award in recognition of innovative scholarship in cultural and political ecology, Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, The Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Tampa, Fl. 

2014. The Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research, (junior faculty) Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse, NY.