Sheyda (Saghar) Safaeyan

Saghar "Sheyda" Safaeyan is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at the University of Arizona. Her research examines the parallels between vegetal life and posthuman configurations in twentieth-century and contemporary speculative fiction and film, shedding light on how these representations engage with urgent issues of environmental degradation and social inequity. Titled “Posthuman Blossoming in Contemporary American Speculative Fiction and Film,” her dissertation draws on a nexus of interdisciplinary fields—including Plant Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Science and Technology Studies—to demonstrate how the plant’s positionality as an exploited, marginalized species, alongside its unexpected resistance to that status, is used in speculative fiction to stage the defiance of racialized, gendered, and naturalized bodies against structural inequities. By offering a vegetal model, called "disorganic entelechy," the project delineates how the narrative device of the posthuman invite us to embrace diverse ways of becoming and thriving with others, akin to the plant, thereby proposing innovative ethical formulations for envisioning just, distributed, and liberatory futures.

From 2014-2018, Sheyda served as an English Literature Instructor at Shiraz Payame Noor University, where she taught courses in Short Story, English Poetry, Survey of English Literature, Literary Criticism, and Reading Comprehension and Proficiency. Since 2018, she has taught first-year Composition and Introduction to Literature courses as a Graduate Teaching Associate at the University of Arizona.