Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies

Education: PhD, University of Chicago
Professional Website

Research Interest

Environmental Justice, Technoscience, Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism, Law and Space, Critical Race and Indigenous Studies, Queer and Transgender Studies

Silas Grant (he/they) is Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. His research focuses on the politics of environmental knowledge, legal and administrative violence, and energy futures in New Mexico. Grant’s work has appeared most recently in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, the American Journal of Public Health, and Engaging Science Technology, and Society. Their book project, Patchwork: Land, Law, and Extraction in Greater Chaco, is a study of oil and gas extraction in the Greater Chaco Landscape of northwestern New Mexico. Grant co-produced and co-wrote the award-winning documentary film Our Story: The Indigenous Led Fight to Protect Greater Chaco (with Michael Ramsey, Daniel Tso, John Hosteen, Julia Bernal, Kendra Pinto, and Hazel James-Tohe).

Grant’s current research focuses on the politics of “decarbonization” in New Mexico, paying particular attention to the colonial, racial, and gendered assumptions built into to new (and old) technologies, as well as anti-capitalist and anti-colonial organizing to advance a just energy transition. Additionally, he is working on several collaborative projects: developing a digital archive and oral history repository of efforts by community members in Eastern Navajo Agency to protect their lands from oil and gas extraction (with Mario Atencio, Leola Paquin, and Lani Tsinnajinnie); examining the responsibilities that land grant universities have towards Indigenous Peoples through archival work at the San Joaquin Marsh Reserve on Acjachemen and Tongva lands in Orange County, California (with Angela Mooney D’Arcy, Ciara Belardes, Christina Marsh, Connie McGuire, Kathleen Johnson, Gabriella Lassos, Stephanie Martinez, and Victoria Lowerson Bredow), and researching connections between fossil fuel extraction and transphobia in the United States (with Queer Ecojustice).

Prior to joining UNM, Grant worked in the non-profit sector and held a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University and a Climate Justice Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Research Justice Shop at the University of California, Irvine.