Email

Preferred: daniel.rivers@sjsu.edu

Alternate: daniel.rivers@sjsu.edu

Telephone

Preferred: 9233230445

Associate Professor of American Studies & Literature

Coordinator, Environmental Humanities (Certificate)

Senior Chair, Environmental Justice Caucus, American Studies Association (ASA, 2022-2026)

Lambda Literary Fellow (2024)

Director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies (2021-2025)

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, teacher, and writer specializing in environmental humanities, ethnic studies, queer and feminist studies, U.S. literatures, and the public humanities. Daniel's writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Terrain.org, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Tahoma Review, Women's Studies, Apogee, Joyland, and the Journal of Transnational American Studies, as well as a few environmental humanities and creative writing anthologies--most recently Writing the Golden State (2024) and Sex Change and the City (2025). They have received fellowships and scholarships from Lambda Literary, Public Voices, Community of Writers, and the James L. Irvine Foundation.

Daniel's first book, California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations, will be published this year by Duke University Press (August 18, 2026). This book traces the entangled histories of environmental and commercial speculation that worlded California into being. Along the way, it articulates a conceptual framework of "speculative ecologies" that asks how the imaginaries of conquest have continued to shape environmental policy and commerce in the time of climate change, inhibiting California residents' and policy-makers' ability to address the challenges of a changing climate, and embrace the regenerative futures offered by decolonial land return. Throughout California Futures, Rivers analyzes archives of decolonial and naturecultural activism that situate care for the environment as a rallying point for creating more equitable and resilient worlds. The scope for this book is broad, moving from grizzly extinction (and reintroduction), to Central Valley agriculture, dam removal on the Klamath, and unhoused encampment in Oakland. As a work emerging at the juncture of Native and indigenous Studies, feminist science studies, queer and feminist ecology, Black studies, critical ethnic studies, California studies, and American studies, California Futures explores how decolonial movements for land return intersect with activist challenges to extractive racial capitalism and environmental injustice.

As a public humanities specialist, Daniel served as Senior Chair of the Environmental Justice Caucus with the American Studies Association (ASA) from 2022-2026, and they spent four years as Director of SJSU's Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. They have taught public-facing classes with the 92nd Street Y's Roundtable program, and presented at events in partnership with the Bill Lane Center for the West (Stanford), the Commonwealth Club's Climate One program, the Monterey Public Library, San José's Martin Luther King Jr. Library, and the Chevy Chase Library in Washington D.C. Daniel's research has also been profiled in The California History podcast (May 2025).

An Associate Professor of American Studies and Literature at San Jose State University, Daniel coordinates the certificate in environmental humanities, and teaches courses at the juncture of American studies, environmental studies, queer and trans studies, US literature, and public cultures. Daniel also supervises MA and MFA theses in the Department of English & Comparative Literature, and serves as an affiliated faculty member in the program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

 

Courses Taught at SJSU:

AMS/HUM/RELS 180: Water & Culture

AMS/ENVS/HUM 159: Nature & World Cultures

AMS 139: Animals & Society

AMS 129: US in a Global Context

AMS 10: Stories that Make America

AMS 1B: American Cultures 1877 to Present

AMS 1A: American Cultures to 1877

ENGL 281:Environmental Futures (graduate)

ENGL 254: Environmental Horror and the Unnatural (graduate)

ENGL/WGSS 184: Queer and Trans 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 441C

https://sjsu.academia.edu/DanielLanzaRivers