Ali Dehdarirad currently teaches American literature and culture at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he obtained his Ph.D. in English-language Literatures, with a focus on American literature. He has published critical essays on the works of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William T. Vollmann, Cormac McCarthy, and Paul Auster. His main research interests include (post)postmodernist and contemporary American literature, urban humanities, geocriticism, California studies, the Anthropocene, and the sustainability discourse.