Sheyda (Saghar) Safaeyan

Sheyda (Saghar) Safaeyan is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at the University of Arizona. Her research centers on the intersection of speculative literature and film with plant studies, medical and environmental humanities, critical posthumanities, indigenous studies, disability studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Titled “Posthuman Blossoming in Contemporary American Speculative Fiction and Film,” her dissertation examines multiethnic American speculative texts through the lens of vegetal life. The project investigates the injustices inflicted upon marginalized populations by imperialistic extractivisms and technoscientific exploitations, particularly within hypercapitalist systems of governance. By adopting an ecological perspective centered on vegetal ontology, Sheyda shows how the plant’s positionality as an exploited, marginalized species—and its resistance to that status—can be used as a framework for analyzing the posthuman characters’ defiance of capitalist-colonialist systems and their ongoing toxic marks on socio-ecological scenes. Her project offers a post-anthropocentric model for envisioning nonhuman generative and subversive vitality—and inherently, our own “vegetable soul”—and prompts a reevaluation of our relationships with other humans and the more-than-human world, essential for imagining more equitable 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 Proficiency. Since 2018, she has taught first-year Composition and Introduction to Literature courses as a Graduate Associate in Teaching at the University of Arizona.