Workshop Speakers
“International & Minority Science Fiction in a Global World”
Melissa Bianchi is a PhD student in the Department of English. Her areas of research include animal studies, digital media studies, cultural studies, and ecocriticsm, with articles appearing in Green Letters (2014)and Computer Games and Technical Communication (2014). Her forthcoming dissertation argues for critical engagement with the representation and simulation of human-animal relations in video games.
Luis Álvarez-Castro is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. He specializes in Spanish literature and culture from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including contemporary representations of that period. He is the author of El universo femenino de Ángel Ganivet [The Feminine in Ángel Ganivet, 1999], La palabra y el ser en la teoría literaria de Unamuno [The Word and Being in Unamuno’s Poetics, 2005], and several critical editions of nineteenth-century literary works.
Shaun Duke is a PhD candidate in the Department of English studying science fiction, postcolonialism, and Caribbean literature. His work has appeared in CrimeThink, Extrapolation, Science Fiction Film and Television and Strange Horizons. In his free time, he hosts the Hugo Award-nominated podcast The Skiffy and Fanty Show.
M. Elizabeth Ginway is Associate Professor of Portuguese in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. She is author of Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in the Land of the Future (2004), and co-editor with J. Andrew Brown of Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice (2012). Her field of research examines science fiction as a social and political barometer for technology and change in Latin America, especially Brazil. She has published articles in Hispania, Foundation, Extrapolation, Science Fiction Studies, Femspec, Revista Iberoamericana, Luso-Brazilian Review, Brasil/Brazil and Modern Language Studies in addition to contributed chapters in several anthologies on science fiction criticism.
Andrew Gordon is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English. In addition to more than 100 published scholarly essays and reviews on American literature and modern film, he is the author and/or editor of A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer (1980); Psychoanalyses/Feminisms (2000); Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness (2003); and Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (2008).
Terry Harpold is Associate Professor in the Department of English. The author of Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008), his sf-related scholarship has appeared in journals such as Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne, IRIS, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Revue Jules Verne, Science Fiction Studies, and Verniana; and in edited collections such as Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture (2011) and Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science (2011). With Daniel Compère and Volker Dehs he is co-editor of Collectionner l’Extraordinaire, sonder l’Ailleurs. Essais sur Jules Verne en l’honneur de Jean-Michel Margot [Collecting the Extraordinary, Sounding the Elsewhere. Essays on Jules Verne in Honor of Jean-Michel Margot, 2015].
Tace Hedrick is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research. Her essays on transnational Latino/a and Latin American intellectual history, and queerness and esotericism in U.S. Latino/a and Latin American writers have appeared in journals such as Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, The Translator, Latin American Literary Review, and The Luso-Brazilian Review, as well as in collections such as Footnotes: On Shoes and The Returning Gaze: Primitivism and Identity in Latin America. She is the author of Mestizo Modernisms: Race, Nation, and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900–1940 (2003).
Patricia Tavares Infantino is originally from Rio de Janeiro. After completing her undergraduate degree in literature in Brazil, she pursued a Masters degree in Romance Languages from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is currently a PhD candidate in UF’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at University of Florida, with research interests in the intersection of science fiction and the crime novel in Latin America.
Konstantinos Kapparis is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Greek Studies in the Department of Classics. His research interests include the Attic Orators, Ancient Greek Social and Cultural History, and Ancient Medical Literature. He is the author of four books (the latest one co-authored with Andrew Wolpert), has contributed to several volumes and collections, and has also published extensively in international journals. He views Greek literature, history and culture, from antiquity to the present day, as one undivided continuum, and this perception of the Greek world is often reflected in his research and teaching.
Andrea Krafft is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. She is currently writing her dissertation about intersections of the fantastic and the domestic in American literature and popular culture after World War II. Most recently, she has presented on her research at the 2014 American Literature Association national conference. In addition to publications on Ray Bradbury and Sylvia Plath, her essay “‘Laughing Through the Words:’ Recovering Housewife Humor in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle”will appear in the forthcoming collection Shirley Jackson: Influences and Confluences.
Anabel Enríquez Piñeiro is a Cuban sf author and academic. She holds degrees in psychology and communication sciences, and is active in science fiction and fantasy circles in Cuba where she participated in the organization of fifteen events related to the genre of science fiction and fantasy in Havana, including several in the visual arts. Most recently, she organized Villaficción 2013 in her hometown of Santa Clara, Cuba. Winner of the 2005 Premio Calendario prize for science fiction, she is author of the short story collection Nada que declarar [Nothing to Declare, 2007]. Many of her articles, stories, and other writing on sf are available on her website Algo que declarar. Creaciones y reflexiones sobre lúdica, literatura y arte fantástico en español [Something to Declare, Creations and Reflections on the Ludic, Literature and Fantastic Art in Spanish. She moved from Cuba to Miami, Florida in December 2013.
Jennifer A. Rea is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics. Her work researches the intersections between the Roman author Vergil and modern science fiction and fantasy. In particular, she is interested in looking at the enduring question of whether or not violence can solve humanity’s problems. In addition to publishing the monograph Legendary Rome (2007) and articles on Vergil, Petronius and pedagogy, she recently received a contract from Oxford University Press to write a graphic history of St. Perpetua’s life, Perpetua’s Journey, and she is also currently working on a book-length manuscript titled, “Empire without End: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Vergil’s Aeneid.”
Stephanie A. Smith is Professor in the Department of English. As a critic and scholar, she is the author of numerous essays on American fiction and science fiction, and Conceived By Liberty: Maternal Figures and 19th-Century American Literature (1995) and Household Words: bloomers, sucker, bombshell, scab, nigger, cyber (2006). As a novelist, she is the author of The Warpaint Trilogy, Warpaint (2012), Baby Rocket (2013) and Content Burns (2014); Other Nature (1995, short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, given for sf and fantasy that expands our understanding of gender), The-Boy-Who-Was-Thrown-Away (1987) and Snow-Eyes (1985), and has won multiple fiction residencies at the Martha’s Vineyard Writer’s Residency in the Noepe Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Norcroft, Provincetown and Dorland.
Joseph Weakland is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. He works at the intersection of writing studies, science fiction studies, and sustainability education. His current research project draws on science fictional thought processes in order to explore rhetorical possibilities opened up by emergent technologies. He recently collaborated with UF’s Nanoscale Research Facility to design and write “#ecocomposition” – the world’s smallest hashtag – in order to chart the rhetorical processes by which nanoscale materiality acquires meaning and value in digital culture. His published essays on the science fiction of Linda Nagata, K.W. Jeter, and China Miéville are forthcoming.
Phillip E. Wegner is Professor and Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar in the Department of English. In addition to nearly 50 essays on contemporary literature and film, twentieth-century culture, genre theory, utopian fiction, and science fiction, he is the author of Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (2002); Life Between Two Deaths: U.S. Culture, 1989–2001 (2009); Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative (2014); and Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia (2014); and the editor of a new edition of Robert C. Elliott’s The Shape of Utopia (1970; 2013). He is the president of the Society for Utopian Studies and an editor for the Ralahine Utopian Studies series.