Profile

Rodrigo Simon is a Brazilian journalist, literary critic, and environmental humanities scholar. He earned his PhD in Literary History and Theory from Unicamp, the State University of Campinas, in 2021. Simon has published extensively on science, culture, and politics in Brazil’s main media outlets and hosted his own radio and television shows. In his academic research, Simon explores human-nonhuman interactions and the reworkings of ideas of the sacred and the political in out-of-the-way literatures. He is particularly drawn to writings of historically marginalized intellectuals and is deeply committed to disseminating the creative works of Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian artists. Simon is currently completing his first book, which centers on the novelistic human-environment refigurings crafted by Ricardo Guilherme Dicke, an early ecologically-attuned writer raised in the Brazilian backlands. He is also editing “In Search of Who Got Lost,” a collection of Dicke’s unpublished stories. At Princeton, Simon will work closely with colleagues at PIIRS and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, contributing to the research hubs Engaging Indigenous Ecologies of Knowledges and Decolonizing the Arts and leading science popularization efforts. He will also start a new project on resistances to Amazonian dystopias, with the focus on the trajectory of the Brazilian Afro-Indigenous author Verenilde Pereira and her groundbreaking decolonial framework.