Samia Rahimtoola’s research focuses on 20th-/21st-century American literature, particularly where it intersects with critical/queer/decolonial environmentalisms, technology studies, and the study of creativity and innovation. Most recently, her work attends to literary and social practices that offer alternatives to mainstream frameworks of environmental thought, including rugged individualism, discourses of crisis and creative destruction, place-based environmentalisms, and the enframing of nature as resource and service.
Her current book project redefines mid-20th-century poetics of process as a critical engagement with top-down, technocratic methods of managing and manipulating the human and nonhuman environment. She is also at work on a book-length poem titled Revelation Desert Flow, which explores interactions between damaged landscapes and the racialized body.
She teaches the American 20th-century quite broadly, ranging outside the century to teach environmental cultures going all the way back to early America. Her courses open up to contemporary social, political, and environmental challenges, while also attending to the formal intricacies of language on the page.
Rahimtoola, Samia. “The Poetics of Drift: Coloniality, Place, and Environmental Racialization in 21st Century African American Poetry.” In Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s, edited by Andrew Strombeck and Jean-Thomas Tremblay. Albany: SUNY Press, 2021.
Rahimtoola, Samia. “‘Hung Up in the Flood’: Resilience, Variability, and the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker.” In Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, edited by Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018.
Hume, Angela and Samia Rahimtoola. “Introduction: Queering Ecopoetics.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25, no. 1 (2018): 134-149.
Review of Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene, by Lynn Keller, Modern Philology, Vol. 117, Issue 2 (published online ahead of print August 23, 2019). Available at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086.705696.