Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond

Comparative Literature and Luso-Brazilian Studies

Research Interests: Critical animal studies, Comparative race studies, Luso-Brazilian literatures and cultures

Research Abstract: Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond’s early work analyzes the discourse of mestiçagem (“racial mixing”) in Brazil. Focused on Gilberto Freyre’s sociology of plantation relations, her research examines the relationship of racial identity to canon formation and its intersections with U.S. identity politics, Caribbean mestizo projects, and the perpetuation of Portuguese colonial rule in Africa in the 1970s. Her publications on race and the legacies of African enslavement include a monograph, White Negritude: Race, Writing and Brazilian Cultural Identity (Palgrave, 2008) and an edited volume, The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries (Palgrave, 2005).

Dr. Isfahani-Hammond’s research in the field of critical animal studies centers autotheory, intersecting oppressions and rhetorical strategies for legitimizing mass-scale harm. It has appeared in journals and anthologies including Luso-Brazilian Review, e-misférica, Animal Studies Journal, The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2022); and Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies (Routledge, 2020).

Her current book project, “My Aunt, the Horse,” blends theory with creative nonfiction to meditate on grief, caregiving, Islamophobia and the commodification of human and other-than-human animals. Drawing on literature by André Alexis, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Nizami Ganjavi and João Guimarães Rosa, Dr. Isfahani-Hammond foregrounds embodied experience, kinship and ethical responsibility. Grieving for animals and animalized humans is a form of counter-conduct, an oppositional praxis to the ethos of extractivism. It is a precondition for manifesting a future that privileges care over destruction.

In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Isfahani-Hammond is a poet and public writer. Her creative work appears in Sargasso (forthcoming) and anthologies including Radical Kinship in the Capitalocene: Interspecies Ontologies and Biopolitical Resistance (Radish Press!, 2026), Animated Wor(l)ds: Language and Relationality for Multispecies Kinship (2026), and Art of Dissent: Protest Graphics and Poetry for Palestine (Politicizing Pictures Press, 2025). Her essays and commentary have appeared in The Conversation, The Advocate, CounterPunch, Ms. Magazine, Truthout, Persianesque, Leia, and Folha de S. Paulo.

A Fulbright Fellow, Dr. Isfahani-Hammond taught at the University of Southern California, the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras and the Federal University of Pernambuco–Recife (Brazil) before joining the University of California, San Diego in 2008.

Last updated: January 5, 2025

• Ph.D., UC Berkeley

• B.A., UC Berkeley; University of São Paulo (Brazil)