Member Bio
Byron Santangelo is a professor of English and environmental studies at the University of Kansas. His research focuses on the intersection of sub-Saharan African literature, grassroots environmental activism and writing, and environmental justice. Deploying an interdisciplinary critical framework informed by postcolonial studies and political ecology, his work makes visible legacies of African environmental writing that challenge dominant Western conceptions of nature and environmentalism and point to the impossibility of separating environmental projects from issues of social struggle and injustice. Recently, Byron codirected a project entitled Migration Stories: Africans in Midwestern Communities, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and run by the Kansas African Studies Center at the University of Kansas. The project gathered and disseminated stories in various forms about both the experience of immigration for Africans and the impact of changing demographics for Midwestern communities.
Projects
A Crisis of Liberty: Climate Change and Traumatic Displacement in Teju Cole’s Open City
Email bsantang@ku.edu