Rebecca Oh

Rebecca S. Oh received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and her B.A. from the University of Virginia. She specializes in postcolonial literature and the environmental humanities. 

Her first book, Reading Better States: Utopian Method and Environmental Harm in the Global South, was published by Fordham University Press in 2026. Reading Better States traces the persistence of desires for the postcolonial state in an era of environmental harms and climate catastrophe. As pollution, toxicity, drought, and flood increasingly threaten peoples and environments across the global South, postcolonial writers and ordinary citizens alike have not ceded their futures to the damaged presents they inhabit. Rather, Reading Better States shows how they turn to the state as a resource, imagining postcolonial states as powerful actors and calling upon them to intervene in processes like global capitalism and environmental racism, or to provide environmental protections and basic material necessities. These utopic possibilities are concrete rather than grand, limited and situated rather than totalizing. But they are no less utopic for being quotidian. Using a wide-ranging archive of novels, films, court decisions, legislation, poetry, and testimony from India, Nigeria, South Africa, and the Pacific, Reading Better States reveals how the state is contradictory and Janus-faced. It is a bad actor, but it is also a site of collective hopes and concrete utopian visions. Reading Better States challenges the anti-statism prevalent in postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities, where states are predominantly defined through violence. Instead, the book reads postcolonial states beyond their bad surfaces through utopian method, a way of seeing the state that reads its negativity against the grain for alternative possibilities in the past, present, and future.

Rebecca is beginning work on a second book project, tentatively titled "Apocalyptic Realism." Her other research interests include infrastructure and genre.