Born in Alabama, Liza then grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia, on a regional diet of cornbread, peas, greens, and fried okra. These comfort foods remain her favorite meal and made the Guatemalan staples of corn tortillas, beans, and greens feel like home.
A proud graduate of public schools, Dr. Grandia traces her academic success and love for research to the "Friends of the Library" club her parents founded in their small Georgia town, which filled their basements with used books in storage for the annual fundraising sale. As a professor, she loves working with first-generation students to find their way into the university. A fast-paced and dynamic lecturer, she encourages students to go to the library and use research to solve real-world problems. Having stopped an oil pipeline and won other major environmental victories as an undergraduate student activist, she believes deeply in the power of students to catalyze social change.
In a “gap” year during college, she began her work in Guatemala as a volunteer extensionist in a village in the Maya Biosphere Reserve in 1993 with Conservation International. Troubled by the Western parks model being imposed on Guatemala, she listened and took careful notes over many months about the villagers' concerns. Over the next several summers, she worked to expand international biodiversity conservation programs to take into account issues important to local communities: health, organic agriculture, gender, medicinal plants, Indigenous human rights, and agrarian reform.
With a Fulbright grant in 1998, she founded and led an integrated health, population, and environment program called Remedios that established family planning services for more than half a million people living in this area of northern Guatemala that continue independently today. After this, Liza became a founding member of ProPetén, one of Guatemala's oldest and most progressive environmental non-profits. For her distinguished service as Board President (2003-2005), she was elected as a permanent emeritus advisor to ProPetén with the late Norman B. Schwartz, a lifelong mentor with whom she shared hundreds of cups of coffee and thousands of letters about anthropological research.
Intrigued by the questions that applied anthropologists like Norman were asking about biodiversity conservation in Guatemala, she returned to the U.S. in 2000 to pursue a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology under the guidance of Dr. Laura Nader at the University of California-Berkeley. Moving back to Guatemala and Belize for another two years of dissertation work, she learned to speak proficient Q'eqchi' Maya while doing 22 months of research that blossomed into two books and numerous articles on biodiversity, agrarian politics, Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and climate change. As a proponent of "slow ethnography" and reciprocity, Dr. Grandia always returns her research to local communities and the broader public through bilingual publications, popular pamphlets, films, editorials, participatory workshops, public lectures, and beyond.
After finishing her Ph.D., Liza returned to Yale for a postdoctoral year with James C. Scott in the Program in Agrarian Studies. Professor Grandia then began her academic career in 2007 at Clark
University in the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment. In 2012, she was tenured into the Department of Native American Studies at UC Davis with cross affiliations with Community Development, Ecology, Geography, Hemispheric Institute of the America, Human Rights Studies, and International Agricultural Development. She welcomes graduate students interested in corporate power, environmental advocacy, and Indigenous human rights. Professor Grandia's office hours are always open and welcome to student activists.
Through her rigorous ethnographic research, she has halted an oil pipeline, reformed World Bank land policies, and provided critical information to thwart other extractive industries. Not content to be just a critic, however, she has continued to fundraise for and foster projects to support women's health, healers, and organic agriculture. For the last ten years she has collaborated with a Q’eqchi’ peasant federation called ACDIP in their “leftovers” movement of territorial defense and restoration. Together they are developing strategies to reclaim sacred sites; re-establish traditional, autonomous governance systems; and reforest denuded Q'eqchi' lands with cacao and other spiritually important trees for climate resiliency.
To help inspire and support younger scholars in lives of engagement and advocacy, Dr. Grandia founded and coordinates the Q’eqchi Scholars Network. She frequently briefs journalists and others about extractive projects and other corporate and development threats across Q’eqchi territory. As director of the Indigenous Research Center of the Americas (IRCA) at UC Davis, she hopes to facilitate more such community-engaged research and research repatriation across the hemisphere.
After being diagnosed with metastatic lymphoma on the eve of her 35th birthday, Liza had a crash course in cancer causation. Beyond healing with medicinal plants, Dr. Grandia became a self-taught expert on the hazards of synthetic carpets, pesticides, and other consumer products made from petrochemicals. Turning turn life's lemons into lemonade, she has become a tireless educator and networker in personal and civic life about greener and healthier homes and institutions on a budget. She quips, “you don't have to be as rich as Gwyneth Paltrow to go green.”
To deepen her scientific understanding of these and other environmental health issues, she won one of thirteen Mellon “New Directions” fellowships in 2017-18 for a self-designed course of study in toxicology and environmental epidemiology. She took 24 courses over 16 months, including organic chemistry alongside her undergraduates. Beyond relearning the periodic table, this experience gave her a new appreciation for the pressures and bureaucratic problems faced by students in neoliberal universities today.
Bringing humor and street performing skills from student activist days to the grim subject of toxics, Dr. Grandia occasionally moonlights as "Professor Canary" to encourage institutions to establish fragrance-free and other health-protective policies (including an upcoming campaign at UC Davis). When children were sickened by new carpets in public schools in her hometown, she established the Woodland Coalition for Green Schools, which won pathbreaking policies on fragrances, Roundup, and other pesticides, cleaning chemicals, and healthy flooring that are being replicated around the country. (For her school work, she won the Sierra Club’s Activist of the Year in 2019 for northern California).
Moving forward, the question that intrigues Dr. Grandia is why in the world people smell Pinesol and think "clean"? As a person who now perceives petrochemical magnitudes more strongly than others, Liza has begun using her chemical scent-sensitivities and ethnographic observation skills to write about cultural perceptions of environmental hazards in everyday life. A series of forthcoming books (on carpet, "charismatic chemicals," and "sickly green" environmental solutions) will document and explore environmental illnesses that often disproportionately affect Indigenous and Native American communities, but to which all of humanity is vulnerable—as theorized in her most recent article, "Canary Science in the Mineshaft of the Anthropocene."
In her spare time, Liza loves tending to her very old house and quasi-urban homestead, practicing qigong, dancing, organic cooking, camping, community theatre, and—above all— mothering a miracle daughter born after chemotherapy....for whom she, like her mama and her mama's mama, still fries up some mighty fine okra.