Lloyd Kevin Sy

Lloyd Alimboyao Sy (he/him/his) works on American literature, mostly from the long nineteenth century, focusing on Native literatures, the environmental humanities, American literary realism, and film. He is working  on his first book project, The Shape of Forest to Come, which reads the history of deforestation and the nineteenth-century American logging industry next to the works of Native writers who respond to the environmental and economic transformations of settler colonialism. Broadly, the project aims to register how these authors discern forms of life and labor possible amidst material and ecological devastation.

Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2022, he received a BA in English and computer science at Brown University and an MA and PhD in English at the University of Virginia, where he was a Jefferson Fellow and a Bradley Fellow. At Yale, he is affiliated with RITM and the Environmental Humanities program.

Selected publications:

“Nedawi Learns to Play: Ludic Indigeneity and the Plum-Stone Game.” Forthcoming at PMLA.

“Contingent Property: Sterlin Harjo’s Road Stories.” American Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 1 (March 2025), 51-76.

“The Pole and the Tree: Zitkála-Šá’s ’Consciousness’ and the New Thought.” Forthcoming at ELH.

“Sarah Orne Jewett’s China.” Forthcoming at American Literary History.

“Bloody Edification: The Violence of Education in Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, vol. 11, no. 2 (Fall 2023), 279-300.

“Stopping by Woods in Mashpee Territory: Belonging in William Apess’s Indian Nullification.” Early American Literature, vol. 58, no. 3 (October 2023), 641-66.

“The Hermeneutics of Starvation: Alienation, Reading, and Fish in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 35, no. 1-2 (Spring 2023), 1-19.