Savannah DiGregorio

Savannah DiGregorio is an Assistant Professor in the School of Applied Sciences and Arts. Her research explores the relationship between race and species, particularly interspecies performances of violence and tenderness in the US South and Caribbean. More broadly, Savannah's work argues for and models an applied humanities approach to the race-animal question, returning us to ways of knowing, being, and feeling that are rooted in the body and its senses. In her current book project, Their Spirits You Can't Digest: Race, Ritual, and the Return of the Animal, Savannah combines literary analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and legal studies to uncover more-than-human rituals of race-making in the US South and beyond.

Savannah is also interested in broader questions surrounding race and the environment. In her second project, tentatively titled Carceral Ecology, she considers how the environment has been shaped by a carceral logic. Carceral ecology is a manifestation of systemic oppression that exploits and molds elements of the natural world into replicas of the hierarchal and disciplinary structures of the prison. Grounded in a transdisciplinary conversation between the earth sciences, African American/Diasporic literature and ecocriticism, and Black ecologies, Savannah traces the global evolution of carceral ecology from its origins in plantation landscapes to contemporary expressions of environmental violence, such as weather manipulation and the racialized impacts of natural disasters. A portion of this project was presented at the Sorbonne Université International Climate Conference (2021) and later published in Épistémocritique: Revue de littérature et savoirs (2023).