Rebecca Lea Potts is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of Environmental Humanities, American Religion, and Popular Culture. Her research brings critical theories of race and sex to bear on American colonial histories. In her current book project, West Textures: Aesthetics and Extraction in Texas, she considers the ways relationships between (non)humans and elemental materials have shaped the religious and economic values of particular place-times. West Textures argues that fossil fuel extraction created the conditions through which Anglo-Protestant colonial regimes valorized and privatized elemental materials. New and developing techniques of excavation bolstered philosophical, theological, and methodological perspectives that prioritized depth, mystery, and immediacy as the texture of truth. 

Rebecca received her PhD in Religious Studies with a Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Before pursuing graduate education, she worked as a construction manager on residential and commercial projects in Austin, Texas. Her work has been published in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography and the Journal of Popular Culture.