Email

Preferred: daniel.rivers@sjsu.edu

Alternate: daniel.rivers@sjsu.edu

Telephone

Preferred: 9233230445

Associate Professor of American Studies & Literature

Director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies

Senior Liaison, Environmental Justice Caucus, American Studies Association (ASA)

Creative Nonfiction Fellow, Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Writers, Summer 2024

Public Voices Fellow, The Op-Ed Project, 2022-2023

 

Education

Ph.D. in Cultural Studies & English, Claremont Graduate University

MA in Humanities & Social Thought, New York University

BA in Liberal Studies, Minor in English, Sonoma State University

Bio

Daniel Lanza Rivers (they/them) is a scholar and teacher in the areas of environmental humanities, American studies, queer studies, and U.S. literature. Their writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Terrain.org, the San Francisco Chronicle, Apogee, Women's Studies, and the Journal of Transnational American Studies, as well as a few environmental humanities anthologies.

Daniel's first book, Life Outside, is under contract with Duke University Press. Life Outside brings together feminist, queer, decolonial, transnational, Black, and Indigenous studies approaches to examine how practices of colonial and ecological speculation have shaped patterns of political domination, environmental extraction, and creative rebellion across the deep time of California's colonization. Balancing a queer and feminist science studies approach to ecology and "nature" with American studies and environmental humanities approaches to cultural production and environmental justice, Life Outside moves among archives of literature, public discourse, natural history, political ecology, ethnography, material culture, and Indigenous science. The chapters of this book move across time and space to examine case studies of entanglement among settler domesticity and grizzly eradication, drought and agricultural industrialization, environmental toxicity and farm worker futures, Black power and wilderness communalism, dam removal and climate change adaptation, and gentrification and urban encampment. Along with interrogating the entwined histories of colonial domination, environmental speculation, and commercial extraction, Life Outside queries archives of creative, activist, and environmental rebellion that locate decolonization, environmental justice, and care for the living world as rallying points for the creation of more just and resilient futures.

In 2024, Daniel was selected as a Creative Nonfiction Fellow by the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Writers. Their other recent publication credits include Writing the Golden State: the new literary terrain of California (Angel City Press, 2024); In the Eyes of the Hungry: A Steinbeck Horror Anthology (Castaigne, 2024), The San Francisco Chronicle (2023), the Steinbeck Review (2022), Bay Area News Matters (2022), Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals (SpringerNature, 2021), Becoming Feral (object-a Creative Studios, 2021), and a guest editorship of the special issue of Women's Studies titled "Futures of Feminist Science Studies" (2019). 

An Associate Professor of American Studies and Literature at San Jose State University, Daniel teaches courses in environmental humanities, American studies, queer studies, and US literature. They also supervise MA and MFA theses in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and serve as Director of the SJSU Center for Steinbeck Studies, a public humanities hub (for more, see steinbeck.com).

 

Courses Taught at SJSU:

AMS/HUM/RELS 180: Special Topics: Water & Culture

AMS/ENVS/HUM 159: Nature & World Cultures

AMS 139: Animals & Society

AMS 10: Stories that Make America

AMS 1B: American Cultures 1877 to Present

AMS 1A: American Cultures to 1877

ENGL 281: Special Topics: Environmental Futures

ENGL/WGSS 184: Queer Literary Studies

ENGL 167: Steinbeck

ENGL 70: Emerging Modernisms and Beyond

ENGL 30: Literature and the Environment

Links

Office Hours: M/W, 11:00-11:30, 4:30-5PM, Clark 420C

https://sjsu.academia.edu/DanielLanzaRivers