Krista Comer joined the Rice faculty in 1998 with a PhD in American Studies. Over the next twenty-five years from a homebase in Houston, she conducted feminist research and writing projects related to the US West, race and Indigeneity, global surfing, and comparative settler colonialisms. As Professor Comer leaves the “day job” at Rice to open up time to write, she oversees ongoing international collaborations of the Institute for Women Surfers and is at work, among other things, on Feminist Surf Life in the Age of Climate Change. For the latest listen to “ Reading Power” (2024) on the Waterpeople podcast. To learn more, or to consult or collaborate, see KristaComer.com

Broadly speaking, Professor Comer’s work forwards the value of critical place consciousness and all that can be teased out from it—place as a politics and a form of accountability to our histories, to one another, and to larger ways of being in the world. Since 2014, Professor Comer has directed the Institute for Women Surfers, a public humanities project in feminist political education which has done trainings in California, Europe and Oceania. At Rice, as a teacher of graduate and undergraduate students, she developed classes like Houston Out on the Town, Youth Studies, The US West & Its Others, Third Wave Feminism, and Post-1945 American Literatures for Peace. For more than ten years she lived on campus with her family as first, the Magister of Baker College, then the inaugural Magister of Duncan College, and finally the Magister of Brown College. Her sons are Rice alums. As Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, she advanced a redirection of the major toward engaged research and she continues to be part of that feminist community. Commitments to professional organizations include the American Studies Association and particularly the Western Literature Association of which she is Past President, current Treasurer, and the recipient of awards and honors.

Professor Comer has written several books, the most recent is Living West as Feminists: Conversations about the Where of Us (2024), on the places we love or belong, or don’t belong, and who we are in them. She has published widely in the essay form, one example: "Surfeminism in an Era of Trump."

To check out new projects and to see a fuller archive of writing, visit KristaComer.com.