- El Sobrante, CA
- San Jose State University, English and Comparative Literature, Faculty MemberSan Jose State University, Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, Department Memberadd
- Cultural Studies, Environmental Justice, Gender and Women's Studies, Critical Race Studies, Indigenous Studies, Queer Studies, and 14 moreWomen of Color Feminism, Environmental Studies, Feminist science and technology studies, Ecology, American Studies, Cultural Geography, Space and Place, Environmental History, Animal Studies, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Transnational American Studies, California, California History, and Public Humanitiesedit
- Daniel Lanza Rivers (they/them) is a scholar and teacher in the areas of environmental humanities, American studies, ... moreDaniel 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. They have received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Public Voices, and the James L. Irvine Foundation.
Daniel's first book, Life Outside, is under contract with Duke University Press. Life Outside brings together Black, Indigenous, feminist, queer, decolonial, and transnational American 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, environmental justice, and the colonial Anthropocene, Life Outside analyzes 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 cultural an environmental entanglement among settler domesticity and grizzly eradication, drought and agricultural industrialization, environmental toxicity and farm worker justice, 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.
Daniel's other recent publication credits include Writing the Golden State (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, 2023), 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 & Comparative Literature, and serve as Director of the SJSU Center for Steinbeck Studies, a public humanities hub (for more, see steinbeck.com).edit - J. Todd Ormsbee (Chair, Humanities/American Studies, SJSU) & Noelle Brada-Williams (Chair, English & Comparative Literature, SJSU)edit
A personal essay exploring the visual and commercial landscape of the I-5 freeway, published in Writing the Golden State, a collection edited by Carmen Fragoza, Romeo Guzman, and Samin Joudat.
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A short story about a fictionalized town in California's Central Valley featuring vampires, environmental racism, high school, and a local museum.
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This article offers a showcase of students' work from the class "ENGL 167: Steinbeck" at San José State University. At the end of the term, students were presented with three options: they could compose a traditional research-based,... more
This article offers a showcase of students' work from the class "ENGL 167: Steinbeck" at San José State University. At the end of the term, students were presented with three options: they could compose a traditional research-based, analytical essay; they could create a series of lesson plans for a high school unit on Steinbeck's work; or they could craft a creative response. All students were required to submit an initial prospectus and a research summary, and students who submitted a creative project were also asked to submit an artist's statement that connected their project to the semester's readings and their external research. The projects shared here use visual art, crafts, collage, creative writing, music, and a crossword to reflect on the author, his work, and his enduring legacy.
Student Co-Authors: AnaChristina Cassidy, Daisy Flores-Solorio, Stefan
Candelaria, Juliane Dang, Allin Harrison, Eros Karadzhov, Jennifer Lopez-Saur, Jessica Roselius, K-Li Sanchez, & Alex Wester.
Student Co-Authors: AnaChristina Cassidy, Daisy Flores-Solorio, Stefan
Candelaria, Juliane Dang, Allin Harrison, Eros Karadzhov, Jennifer Lopez-Saur, Jessica Roselius, K-Li Sanchez, & Alex Wester.
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This essay analyzes representations of agriculture, drought, and fecundity in John Steinbeck's novel To a God Unknown in order to better understand the ways that this novel draws on, revises, and critiques regional histories of... more
This essay analyzes representations of agriculture, drought, and fecundity in John Steinbeck's novel To a God Unknown in order to better understand the ways that this novel draws on, revises, and critiques regional histories of agro-industrial development in California. In particular, it explores parallels between the Wayne ranch's boom-and-bust narrative and its historical antecedents, particularly the rise and fall of California's rancho economy in the mid-nineteenth century. Along the way, this article also examines the ways that Steinbeck's representations of fecundity and drought reflect enduring entanglements between the cultural vocabulary of the U.S. family farm and settler colonial visions of claiming and developing fecund and malleable California landscapes. This article concludes with a reflection on To a God Unknown's enduring relevance to contemporary discussions of water management, drought, and agriculture in the Anthropocene (the contemporary epoch of human-induced climate change), when California's drought seasons are on track to become more regular and intense.
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Audiobook available on Terrain.org. A lyric essay exploring queer archives, family inheritances, and our entanglements with other species through a story about a bear-skin rug. Nominated for the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award by the... more
Audiobook available on Terrain.org. A lyric essay exploring queer archives, family inheritances, and our entanglements with other species through a story about a bear-skin rug. Nominated for the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award by the editors of Terrain.org.
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Op Ed about equity, access, and public transit futures in the SF Bay Area
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This chapter analyzes intertextual representations of white American masculinity and its human and nonhuman others as they arise across a referential chain of three 20th Century hunting novels: William Faulkner's Go Down Moses (1942),... more
This chapter analyzes intertextual representations of white American masculinity and its human and nonhuman others as they arise across a referential chain of three 20th Century hunting novels: William Faulkner's Go Down Moses (1942), Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), and James Dickey's Deliverance (1970). The chapter locates these texts within two historical, political, and conservationist contexts: first, the emergence of federal wilderness enclosure programs and white men's outdoors and eugenics organizations in the 1910s-40s, and second, within the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the social and environmental movements of the 1960s. Throughout my analysis of hunting, racialized and colonial inhumanity, and nonhuman animality in these texts, I develop a queer ecological and critical race theory of "the creaturely." This theory responds to work from Alex Weheliye, Sarah Ensor, and Donna Haraway, and articulates the posture of environmental attunement, interspecies identification, and interracial alliance that emerges in these texts among queer, racialized, and colonized humans and the nonhuman animals and ecologies that make life under the shadow of ritualized violence.
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Creative meditation on the California grizzly published as part of a hybrid creative/scholarly/artistic collection. Collection Link: https://becoming.ink/becoming-feral/
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This essay examines the visual and written cultures of grizzly eradication and settler violence in U.S. California. In addition to unpacking the ways that settlers transformed the California Grizzly into a gendered symbol of imperial... more
This essay examines the visual and written cultures of grizzly eradication and settler violence in U.S. California. In addition to unpacking the ways that settlers transformed the California Grizzly into a gendered symbol of imperial domination, this piece analyzes the ways that public discourse about the untamed outdoors worked to frame Native nations and wild grizzlies as threats to a properly domesticated and commercially productive U.S. California.
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This is a very short supplemental essay, which uses the California Republic Meme as an entry point for discussing the politics of settler violence, ecocide, and erasure in colonial California. This piece was published in conjunction with... more
This is a very short supplemental essay, which uses the California Republic Meme as an entry point for discussing the politics of settler violence, ecocide, and erasure in colonial California. This piece was published in conjunction with my essay in American Quarterly. Find it here: https://www.americanquarterly.org/content/june-2020
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Introduction to the "Futures of Feminist Science Studies" special issue of Women's Studies: an interdisciplinary journal.
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A conversation with Banu Subramanian about doing FSS in the context of the university and the Women's and Gender Studies classroom.
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This article explores a network of “dangerous playgrounds” narratives that were published in the early years of the War on Terror, as the self-deportation movement was gaining momentum with the passage of SB1070. These stories trace the... more
This article explores a network of “dangerous playgrounds” narratives that were published in the early years of the War on Terror, as the self-deportation movement was gaining momentum with the passage of SB1070. These stories trace the journeys of young, white US American tourists traveling to Latin America to release their inhibitions, and ultimately use the conventions of adventure, melodrama, and horror to frame the nativist project of securing U.S. borders and incarcerating and expelling undocumented Latinos as the necessary compromise of a maturing nation. Texts under consideration include Jessica Abel’s critically acclaimed comic La Perdida (2006) and the films Turistas (2006), Borderland (2007), The Ruins (2008), and Indigenous (2014).
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Note from Editor-in-Chief Nina Morgan, Issue introduction by Sabine Kim and Greg Robinson, "Transnational American Studies in the Age of Trump," Special Forum on La Floride française: Florida, France, and the Francophone World, edited by... more
Note from Editor-in-Chief Nina Morgan, Issue introduction by Sabine Kim and Greg Robinson, "Transnational American Studies in the Age of Trump," Special Forum on La Floride française: Florida, France, and the Francophone World, edited by François Dupuigrenet-Desroussilles, Darrin M. McMahon, Martin Munro, Individual Articles by Rajender Kaur, Sunny Yang, Robert G. Lee, Christopher Michael Perreira, Daniel Lanza Rivers, Colleen Tripp, Caroline M. Riley, and Bryan Yazell, plus Reprise excerpts by Ulrich Adelt, Catherine Ceniza Choy, and Karim Bejjit
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Daniel Lanza Rivers in Conversation with Gavin Jones about Jones' new book: Reclaiming Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity
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In this interview (from the CarbonRadio channel on Medium.com), Daniel Lanza Rivers discusses storytelling, writing, and creativity and how they influence us as individuals and as a society.