Sage Gerson

Sage Gerson (she/hers) is a settler scholar who researches and teaches in the fields of Indigenous literatures and ecologies; environmental justice; 20th- and 21st-century literatures; the energy humanities and infrastructure studies; Native, Black and Women of Color feminisms; anticolonial and decolonial theory; and futurisms, futurity and speculative fiction. At RISD, in addition to teaching in Literary Arts and Studies, she also teaches as part of the Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies (NCSS) and Global Arts and Cultures (GAC) graduate programs, as well as the NCSS undergraduate concentration. In all of her courses, Gerson asks students to dwell with cultural imaginaries that provide glimpses of a differently perceivable world, where other formations of environment, identity, power and resistance are possible.

Gerson’s research resides at the intersections of the environmental humanities and the study of colonial modernity through a perspective informed by Black Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies. She is currently working on a book-length project focused on electrified literary imaginaries that complicate linear narratives linking electricity with progress, instead favoring transformative environmental perspectives that exceed developmental and extractive frameworks. You can find her work in (or forthcoming in) Teaching Energy Humanities, Social Text, Media+Environment, Lateral, the University of California Humanities Research Institute’s (UCHRI) Foundry, and as part of The Black Scholar’s Social Justice Handbook series. She is the 2023–24 faculty fellow in the RISD Museum's Prints, Drawings, and Photographs collection. Gerson received her PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also completed an interdepartmental PhD emphasis in Environment and Society.