Dr. Rachel Cypher

Rachel Cypher is an anthropologist and writer whose work explores environmental change and the futures people imagine in times of ecological crisis. She is currently writing a memoir about growing up around Biosphere 2 during the 1990s, exploring abandonment and the cultural fantasies of leaving Earth behind.

Her first book, The Soy Queen: On Attachment and Unruly Life in Industrial Agriculture, draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Argentina’s Pampas to examine the rise of genetically modified soy agriculture. The book argues that even one of the most standardized commodity supply chains on earth depends upon local ecologies, inherited obligations, informal economies, and enduring attachments to land and family life.

Cypher is also co-editor, with Nils Bubandt and Astrid Oberborbeck-Andersen, of Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene: Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds (UMP 2023), a collaborative volume that emerged from her participation in Anna Tsing’s Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) project.

As a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and later as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (2022–2025), Cypher conducted collaborative research on climate adaptation and water futures in the Americas. Her current research examines effluent-fed river restoration in the American West and asks how communities learn to live within increasingly transformed ecological conditions.