Samia Rahimtoola

Affiliation: English
Assistant Professor of English

Samia Rahimtoola is a scholar of modern American literature and culture. Her research focuses on literary engagements with environmentalism, imperialism, and gender and sexuality. Most recently, her work attends to literary and social practices that offer alternatives to mainstream frameworks of environmental thought, such as rugged individualism, crisis and apocalypse, and the enframing of nature as resource and service.

She is completing her first book, Poetry in the Age of Sustainability: Race, Nature, and Nation on Spaceship Earth. The book draws on Black and postcolonial studies to argue that postwar U.S. poetic experimentation was driven by resistance to a then-emerging paradigm of knowing and managing nature. She is also at work on a book-length poem, Revelation Desert Flow, which investigates the racial landscapes of the transnational American desert, from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to the Middle East. 

 

Education

  • PhD, University of California, Berkeley
  • BA, Reed College