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    English Department UC Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170

Sage Gerson is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Her research and teaching interests include Environmental Justice, Energy Humanities, Infrastructure Studies, Critical Race and Decolonial Theory, Native American Literature, African American Literature, Speculative and Science Fiction, and Feminist and Queer Science and Technology Studies (FQSTS).

Her dissertation is primarily concerned with the entangled and co-constitutive relationship between electrical power and sociocultural/political power. In the dissertation, she argues that electrified literary imaginaries perform infrastructural world building that provides conceptual context for how “real world” electricity infrastructure is interpreted, received, and experienced. The project’s selected fictional imaginaries work athwart teleological infrastructural narratives of Western modernity, while making legible real world infrastructural projects and their histories.

Fellowships and Awards:

  • UCSB Graduate Humanities Research Fellowship (2020-2021)
  • Richard Helgerson Graduate Student Achievement Award (2020) for dissertation chapter titled “Siphoning and Sabotage: Invisible Man and U.S. Electricity Theft”
  • Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Energy Justice in Global Perspective Fellowship (2018-2019)
  • “Developing the Archive/Vitalizing Primary Research” Arnhold Project Fellowship (2018)

Publications:

Forthcoming in Cultural Studies and Media + Environment.

Research Experience:

  • Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative Graduate Researcher (2019-2020)
  • Literature and Environment Research Initiative Graduate Researcher (2018-2019)

Courses Taught:

  • “Reading Infrastructure, Building Worlds”
  • “Energy Justice, Scholar-Activism, and Community Based Research”
  • “Literatures of Southern California”
  • “Animacy and the Speaking Earth: The Power of Native Story”
  • “Visionary Fictions”

 

Research Areas

  • American Literature
  • Environment and Ecocriticism

Research Center Affiliations

  • Email:
  • Mailing Address:
    English Department UC Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170