From North Carolina to the Comanche homelands of West Texas
I have followed an unconventional and happily venturesome path through literature, law, environmental restoration, archives, information science, and public life.
Some of my most important education happened outside the classroom: volunteering to live in community with formerly incarcerated people, hiking the Appalachian Trail after graduating from Notre Dame, and working in forestry and wetland restoration to help pay my way through law school. I experienced the satisfaction of watching cutover fields return to wetland forests coursing with fish and waterfowl—and, years later, the distress of seeing some of those same landscapes hammered by climate change.
Today I serve as Director of the Texas Tech Climate Center and Professor of Humanities and Literature in Texas Tech University’s Honors College. I am also the founder and director of Creating Livable Futures, an interdisciplinary initiative in resilience and engaged learning that grew, in part, from conversations with E.O. Wilson and Barry Lopez.
My work now centers on a set of converging problems: climate change, disinformation, emerging technology, and the weakening of public trust. I am interested not only in how knowledge is produced, but in how it travels—how people and institutions decide what to believe, what to preserve, and how to act when information becomes contested.
That concern builds on my years as Director of the Southern Historical Collection at UNC–Chapel Hill, one of the world’s largest archives devoted to the history and culture of the American South. Directing the collection drew me into information science, digital forensics, and the politics of public memory. It also reinforced my conviction that archives should not simply collect communities from a distance. They should give people practical tools for preserving and interpreting their own histories.
Projects such as Archivist in a Backpack and Maya from the Margins grew from that conviction, as did my continuing work with community archives in North Carolina and Texas. Along the way, I have helped students recover a Texas heirloom apple variety missing for a century and worked with public media to document the lost apples of Texas. These projects may appear far removed from one another, but each asks how knowledge can be recovered, trusted, and returned to public use.
My recent research carries these questions into digital space. As a 2025 Fulbright U.S. Scholar at the University of Antwerp, I studied climate misinformation and the datafication of citizenship, particularly in relation to communities in the Global South. I collaborated (and still do collaborate) with colleagues in the InfoCitizen network, The Web Science Institute and Institute for Arts and Humanities at the University of Southampton, and C3DS at the University of Exeter.
Current books include Russia’s Disinformation Machine: Inside an Internet Troll Farm, written with Ori Swed and forthcoming from Lynne Rienner Publishers; Sowing the West Texas Wind, an interdisciplinary collection on misinformation and community response; and The God of Dark Matter: Apophatic Knowledge and Contemporary Scientific Discovery, under contract with the University of Notre Dame Press.
The last of these grows from another longstanding strand of my work: the encounter between literature, science, and mystery. My book Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy’s Expanding Worlds traces McCarthy’s engagement with physics, mathematics, ecology, and the intellectual community surrounding the Santa Fe Institute. The God of Dark Matter extends that inquiry by bringing contemporary scientific discovery into conversation with the traditions of negative theology.
I am also co-leading Trust, Truth, and Technology: Building AI Literacy for Older Adults in West Texas, supported by a 2026 Spencer Foundation Vision Grant. Related projects examine contested information during disasters and emergencies, as well as the place of attention, humility, and discernment in human formation during an age of artificial intelligence.
My scholarship and public projects have received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the U.S. Department of State and American Alliance of Museums, National Geographic, and other partners. Across these efforts, I have tried to build durable connections among universities, communities, cultural institutions, and the people whose knowledge they exist to serve.
I was raised in Raleigh and hold both a J.D. and Ph.D. from UNC–Chapel Hill. As a former UNC administrator with active family and professional ties across Duke, UNC, NC State, and the Research Triangle, I continue to develop partnerships in North Carolina around climate resilience, public trust, responsible AI, archives, and the public humanities.
I remain, at heart, a writer, conservationist, teacher, and dreamer of good dreams.
Bryan Giemza 