Astrida Neimanis

Astrida Neimanis is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus, holding a Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities. She is jointly appointed across English and Cultural Studies, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, and the Indigenous Knowledges, Sustainability program within the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Her educational background includes a PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University in Toronto and an MSc in Gender from the London School of Economics.

Neimanis is a leading cultural theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Her research focuses on bodies, water, and weather, exploring how these elements can help reimagine justice, care, responsibility, and relationality in the time of climate catastrophe. Her work spans ecofeminisms, material feminisms, intersectionality, cultural studies of water, weather and climate change, and multispecies justice. She approaches these topics through interdisciplinary methodologies that often bridge academic, artistic, and community practices.

Her publications reveal a consistent focus on feminist environmental thought, with particular attention to aquatic ecologies, embodied experience, and the politics of weathering climate change. Her book Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology represents a significant contribution to the field, proposing that humans examine their relationships to oceans and other water bodies from the perspective of our own watery bodies.

• Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities

Neimanis actively supervises graduate students and leads several significant research collaborations. She founded The FEELed Lab, a feminist environmental humanities field lab that amplifies feminist, queer, crip, anticolonial, and antiracist perspectives to address social and environmental crises. She also co-founded The Weathering Collective and previously served as Co-Director of The Seed Box: An Environmental Humanities Collaboratory from 2015-2022. Her research practice includes collaborations with artists, writers, scientists, and communities through experimental public pedagogies.

Her work is characterized by a commitment to accessible, interdisciplinary environmental humanities that bridges academic research with community engagement, artistic practice, and public scholarship.