Jeffrey Santa Ana received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania (English and
Environmental Studies) and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.
His research and teaching focus on the environmental humanities and ecocriticism,
decolonization and postcolonial criticism, critical ethnic studies, gender and sexuality
(queer) studies, memory studies, and film studies and film narrative. He is the author
of RACIAL FEELINGS: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion (Temple University
Press), which shows how Asian American narratives communicate and critique—to varying
degrees—the emotions that power the perception of Asians as racially different in
America’s modern capitalist system. He is a co-editor and contributor of the book
volume EMPIRE AND ENVIRONMENT: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific (University of
Michigan Press). Santa Ana is currently at work on a new book titled Flood Memory:
Decolonial Land and Water Reckoning in the Transpacific. By examining human-induced
environmental ruin in examples of recent catastrophic weather events and in Pacific
Islander and Asian diasporic cultural works (literature, graphic narrative, and film),
Flood Memory conceives a decolonial ecology critique to locate our contemporary climate
and environmental crisis in histories of colonialism and imperialist extraction in
North America and the transpacific. Santa Ana is the recipient of a Ford Foundation
Fellowship and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and the Faculty
Diversity Program Award from Diversity and Educational Equity, SUNY.