Chaney Hill is an early career scholar and Instructor in the Program in Environmental Studies at Rice University. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Rice, where she focused on the intersections of environmental humanities, public memory, and regional literary studies.

Her research explores environmental justice, critical regionalism, and the ways memory shapes landscapes in Texas and the U.S. South and West. She is especially interested in how sites of ecological and historical rupture—such as borderlands, cemeteries, and climate-exposed regions—reveal the entangled legacies of colonialism, extractivism, and resistance.

Her scholarship appears in Western American Literature and Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and she has a forthcoming chapter in an edited volume on war memorials titled "Tracing Monumentalization and Resistance: Counter-Monument Aesthetics and the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall." She is also the creator of the Critical Texas Studies Toolkit, an ongoing collaborative digital humanities project designed to support educators, researchers, and community organizers working toward more just and equitable futures in the state.

Dr. Hill’s public-facing work includes contributions to the Racial Geography Project at Rice, summer teaching on environmental justice for Houston-area high school students, and ongoing editorial work with the Southern Review of Books. Her teaching and writing are grounded in the belief that engaged humanities scholarship plays a vital role in confronting climate crisis, challenging structural inequalities, and amplifying local knowledges.