Ted Geier

For the department, Dr. Geier primarily teaches AMS 157: Animals in American Culture and AMS 25: The United States as a Business Culture. He has also taught the department’s food studies courses over the years. 

Dr. Geier is an interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar with specialties in animals and environment, literature, film, ‘work culture’, and critical 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 2023, he co-founded and continues as Associate Editor of Animal History, a new journal with the University of California Press. In 2020-21, he was Managing Editor of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (Oxford UP) prior to beginning a role as Research Editor & Coordinator for the Harvard Law School Animal Law & Policy Program’s Animal Markets and Zoonotic Disease international research initiative.

While still a graduate student at Davis, he founded an interdisciplinary animal studies research group across multiple colleges including Veterinary Medicine, Animal Science, and Humanities, which hosted conference and research events on animal welfare and cultural studies. The most recent events have focused on race and labor, featuring guests such as Claire Jean Kim, Bénédicte Boisseron, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Kendra Coulter, and Drew Robert Winter. 

Dr. Geier has taught animal studies and social justice themes, Philosophy, Humanities, film, literary studies, international English language and culture, and writing for UC Davis, The California State University system, Rice University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among other gigs. He has written two books, several articles and book chapters, and book reviews, and is currently at work on an edited volume on Cormac McCarthy and ecology as well as a brief volume on Terrence Malick’s film Song to Song. His longtime, ongoing larger project is a book on “Eco Disney,” and he has regularly taught a FYS on Disney’s Environments and Politics at UC Davis over the years.