Lloyd Alimboyao Sy

Lloyd Alimboyao Sy is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. He works on American literature, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on Native literatures, the environmental humanities, American literary realism, and film. He is completing 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. A second book project rereads the history of American literary regionalism by investigating its maneuvers in conjunction with geographically proximal texts authored by Native people.

Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2022, he received a Ph.D. in English at the University of Virginia. His work appears or is forthcoming at PMLA, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and ELH, among other venues.

updated November 2025