Krista comer
Krista Comer is a writer, scholar, and speaker on contemporary American culture and global surf communities. She writes books and has published widely in the essay form. In 2025, to open time for other projects, Krista retired from Rice University in Houston, Texas, and from teaching graduate and undergraduate students.
Since 2014, Krista has directed the Institute for Women Surfers (IWS), a public humanities project in feminist political education which has done trainings in California, Europe and Oceania. Currently she oversees international collaborations of the IWS and is at work, among other things, on Feminist Surf Life in the Age of Climate Change and on a memoir.
Krista has a PhD from Brown University in American Studies. As a feminist writer and researcher, she is interested in justice issues as they relate to the US West, race and Indigeneity, global surfing, and comparative settler colonialisms. Broadly speaking, Krista’s work forwards the value of critical place consciousness and all that can be teased out from it—place as a politics and a form of accountability to our histories, to one another, and to larger ways of being in the world.
The circle of place names on this website is a way of showing what feminists call “positionality” or locating who one is in the world, and in writing. The places of Krista’s life are how she tracks a specific education and also a sense of political accountabilities