Sage Gerson

on sabbatical fall 2026 and Wintersession 2027

Sage Gerson (she/her) is a settler scholar of the environmental humanities. She researches and teaches at the intersections of environmental literary studies and the critical study of Western colonial modernity informed by Indigenous Studies and Black Studies.

Gerson’s current book project analyzes the power grid through a collection of Native and Black literatures and ecologies. The electrified imaginaries of these works not only diagnose colonialism’s ongoing cultural, political, and environmental violence, but are also about worldbuilding: they rewrite flows of power and narrate modes of energy justice. Gerson is coeditor of the forthcoming volume Waste Collection: The Ecologies, Politics, and Complexities of Discard, which is under contract with Bloomsbury (expected 2027). You can find her published research in the journals Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), Social Text, Media+Environment, and the Cultural Studies Association’s Lateral, among other places.

As a teacher, Gerson strives to stage a series of imaginative, narrative, and experiential openings for her students by centering works of literature and cultural production that challenge students to rethink and reimagine their worlds. Gerson is the 2026 recipient of RISD’s John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. 

Gerson is chair of the American Studies Association’s (ASA) Environmental Justice Caucus. She was the Faculty Fellow in the RISD Museum’s Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Collection from 2023–25. Her work has been generously supported by the ACLS and Mellon Foundations, as well as the University of California Humanities Research Institute. She received her PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also completed an interdepartmental PhD emphasis in Environment and Society.