Ted Geier Research Editor
Dr. Geier is an interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar with specialties in animals and environment, literature, film, and theory. He completed his PhD. in Comparative Literature & Critical Theory at UC Davis and was then a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Rice University 2015-16 Rice Seminars, “After Biopolitics,” with Cary Wolfe and Timothy Morton. In 2020-21, he was Managing Editor of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (Oxford UP) prior to beginning his role as Research Editor & Coordinator for the ALPP Animal Markets and Zoonotic Disease research initiative.
While still a graduate student at Davis, he founded an interdisciplinary animal studies research initiative (2013-20) across multiple colleges including Veterinary Medicine, Animal Science, and Humanities, which hosted conference and research events on animal welfare and cultural studies. More recently, he teaches animal studies and social justice themes, and other subjects, in Philosophy, American Studies, Humanities, film, and literary studies at UC Davis, The California State University system, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Current research projects include a brief book-length study of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men and a larger book project, “Eco_Disney” analyzing Disney’s assertive yet simplified narratives of coexistence, diversity, and ecology via racialized, gendered, and colonizing anthropomorphic designs in, for example, Zootopia, Bambi, and WALL-E. Significant topics include: How Disney films and songs express ecological thought. How the corporate practices, economic and land use impacts, digital presences, and social missions of Disney articulate consumer identities and influence the world. How Disney’s texts—narratives, constructed spaces such as theme parks and immersive animal experiences, real estate, and a dazzling media ecology extending into sports and news—“Disney-fy” the public imaginary of animal concern, environmentalism, and political action across the world (and beyond!).
Publications:
Meat Markets: The Cultural History of Bloody London (2017, Edinburgh University Press).
Kafka’s Nonhuman Form (2016, Palgrave Studies in Animals & Literature Series).
Editor of Special Issue on Terrence Malick’s Ecocinema, New Review of Film & Television Studies 17.1 (Winter 2019).
“Kafka’s Meat: Beautiful Processes and Perfect Victims,” in Literature and Meat Since 1900, ed. Seán McCorry and John Miller (2019, Palgrave Studies in Animals & Literature Series).
“Anthropocene Performance: Work Without Ends,” in Planet Work, ed. Ryan Hediger (forthcoming, Bucknell University Press).
“‘Looking Glass Creatures’: Anti-Human Politics in Tenniel’s Alice.” Tabula Rasa 30 (July 2019). [Spanish]
“Nobody’s Home: The Ecology of Terrence Malick.” Special issue lead article.
New Review of Film and Television Studies 17.1 (2019).
“Noncommittal Commitment: Alien Spaces of Ecocosmopolitics in Recent World Literature,” in Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Spatial Studies. Robert Tally and Christine Battista, eds. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
“Real Life: Italo Calvino’s Funghi Ecology.” PAN – Philosophy, Activism, Nature 10 (2013).
“Doing the Work: Taxonomies of Animal Study and the Labor of Love.” Review Essay on Scarlett Experiment: Birds and Humans in America, by Jeff Karnicky & Thinking Through Animals: Identity Difference Indistinction, by Matthew Calarco. Configurations 26.2 (2018).
Review of Animal Life and the Moving Image. Eds. Laura McMahon & Michael Lawrence. Parallax 23.1 (2017).