Savannah DiGregorio

Savannah DiGregorio is an Assistant Professor of Animal Studies in the School of Applied Sciences and Arts. Interdisciplinary in nature, Savannah's work engages what she calls applied humanities, an embodied critical practice that brings literary and cultural analysis into encounter with the real animals at the center of discourse. More specifically, her research explores the material relationships between race and species, particularly interspecies performances of violence and tenderness in the US South and French Caribbean. In Savannah's current book project, Their Spirits You Can't Digest: Rituals of Race and Species, she combines literary analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and legal studies to uncover more-than-human rituals of race-making in the US South and beyond.

Savannah also leads the Animal Studies Across Disciplines Symposium, supported by ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory through the Create the Change initiative. Beginning in ASU classrooms and culminating in an annual academic symposium, the project creates an interdisciplinary space that centers animals and interspecies relations as critical to questions of environmental justice and planetary health. Bringing together scholars, students, animal professionals, and community members, the symposium fosters a collaborative network committed to advancing more just and hospitable multispecies futures.

The next symposium will take place in April of 2026.

In addition to this work, Savannah is 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).