Oliver Aas

Born and raised in Estonia, Oliver Aas is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of environmental humanities, visual studies, and comparative literature. His current book project, Arctic Forms: Literature, Art, Politics, examines the figure of the Arctic in the Anthropocene. His work addresses a central paradox: Although melting ice presents a radically new ecological problem, many of the representational strategies used to depict this phenomenon across different cultures and national registers—such as cartography, the sublime and the spectacular, and Cold War rhetoric—are inherited from earlier traditions. By engaging in a diachronic dialogue between “now” and “then,” Oliver asks how those older media change our contemporary understanding of climate change. He has also published on post-Soviet environmentalism, lowbrow music cultures, and the intersections between trauma, war, and digital art. He completed his PhD at Cornell University.