Dr. Rachel Cypher

Anthropologist

Fulbright Scholar 2024-2025

I am an environmental anthropologist, researcher, and teacher specializing in human-induced environmental change and climate adaptation in the Americas. I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Pampa in Argentina, a position supported by the Fulbright Commission, as well as a research scholar with the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

My first manuscript is about the fragmentation of one of the last grasslands on earth. Narrated during Argentina’s “soy boom,” when farmers replaced millions of hectares of Pampean forage with genetically modified soybeans, the book delves into the complicated relationships that compel the farmers to plant GM soybeans despite widespread damage.

I have recently co-edited with Nils Bubandt and Astrid Oberborbeck-Andersen Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene: Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds (UMP 2023). It is a follow-up to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (UMP 2017) and emerges from my collaboration and engagement with the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) project between 2014 and 2019.

I am currently working on two emerging research projects, one in the dry land forests of Argentina, and one on a border river between Mexico and Arizona. Both projects deal with social-ecological restoration after human-induced environmental change.

I received my BA from the University of Pennsylvania (‘07), my MA from UC Berkeley (‘12) and my PhD from UC Santa Cruz (‘22). Between 2022-2023 I was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.

I am originally from Tucson, Arizona.