Rachael Uwada Clifford is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. Her questions traverse the fields of aesthetics, environmental studies, Black and Indigenous studies, postcolonial studies, and women’s and gender studies. Drawing from poetics, decoloniality, and philosophy of ecology, her dissertation explores how African, African American, and Caribbean women writers and poets conceive of the relationship between human and nonhuman nature through the coming-of-age narrative. She is interested in bringing this conception to bear on contemporary ecological violence alongside the ongoing legacies of slavery and colonialism.

She is also a writer and a poet, at work on her first collection of short stories and her first poetry collection.