SFWG Members

Badredine Arfi is Professor in the Department of Political Science. His scholarly articles have appeared in such journals as International Philosophy and Social Criticism,  European Journal of Social Theory, International Studies Quarterly, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, International Political Sociology, Security Studies, Political Analysis, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Rationality and Society, Democratization, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review B, and Physica A. He is the author of International Change and the Stability of Multi-ethnic States (2005), Linguistic Fuzzy Logic Methods in Social Sciences (2010), and Re-Thinking International Relations Theory via Deconstruction (2012).

Samantha Baugus is a PhD student in the Department of English. Her areas of research include human-animal studies, science fiction and fantasy literature, representations of animals, the environment, climate change, and ecocriticism, and feminist theory.

Chesya Burke is a PhD student in the Department of English. Her research interest include Black Women speculative fiction writers, Afrofuturism, Black feminism, cultural studies, and genre studies. Burke has written and published nearly a hundred fiction pieces and articles within the genres of science fiction, fantasy, noir and horror, and her 2011 story collection, Let’s Play White, is being taught in universities around the country. In addition, Burke’s novel, The Strange Crimes of Little Africa, debuts later this fall, and her comic, Shiv, is scheduled to debut in summer of 2016. Burke is also the Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of Charis Books and More, one of the oldest feminist book stores in the country.

Jason Crider is a PhD student in the Department of English. His research and teaching are focused on the intersection of rhetoric, writing, and digital media studies. His scholarly interests include posthumanism, media ecology, and digital materialism. He has recently given presentations arguing for critical approaches to augmented reality and digital humanities scholarship

Sid Dobrin is Department Chair and Research Foundation Professor in the Department of English. He has written or edited more than 18 books about writing, ecology, technology, and posthumanism.

Jonathan Edelmann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion. He is a section editor for the International Journal of Hindu Studies, and was an American Academy of Religion Luce Fellow in Comparative Theology and Theologies of Religious Pluralism. His book, Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhāgavata Purāṇa and Contemporary Theory (2013) won a John Templeton Foundation Award and the Dharma Academy of North America’s Book Prize. He assists in the University of Florida’s Center for the Study of Hindu Traditions (CHiTra).

Jaquelin Elliott is a PhD student in the Department of English. She is currently sub-concentrating in Victorian Studies and Children’s Literature and has forthcoming conference presentations at the Children’s Literature Association, the International Gothic Association, and the South Central MLA. Her academic interests include horror, the Gothic, cultural studies, fan studies, queer theory, and spending far too much time talking about monsters.

Tiffany Esteban is the Digital Scholarship Associate at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library West. She consults on digital humanities projects across campus, co-convenes the UF Digital Humanities Working Group, and manages the Scott Nygren Scholars Studio. She is interested in the application of game studies and game design to immersive digital humanities projects.

Jeanne Ewert is the English and American Literature, Film and Folklore Librarian at the George A. Smathers Libraries. She began her tenure at the Libraries by coordinating the 2018 UF “Frankenread,” co-sponsored by the Libraries, the SFWG, and the Keats-Shelley Association of America, during which the entirety of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein was read aloud by faculty, students, and community leaders, in celebration of the book’s 200th anniversary of publication. Currently she is working with the SFWG and the Marston Science Library on “Asimov@100,”, circulating display of the Libraries’ holdings of Asimov’s work, including biographies and critical works, to commemorate the 100th anniverary of author’s birth.

Robert Ferl is Distinguished Professor and Assistant Vice President in the Office of Research. He is a molecular biologist with an experiment heritage is the study of the adaptation of terrestrial life to space travel. Among his honors are the 2016 NASA Medal of Honor for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and the 2016 AIAA Jeffries Aerospace Medicine and Life Sciences Research Award. While a dedicated lab geek, he enjoys and advocates for the experiential side of science – he has flown with experiments on many parabolic flights and other research aircraft to study aspects of the microgravity environment and he conducts science in space-related planetary exploration analogs including the Haughton Mars Project in the Arctic and in Antarctica. His SF interests are varied, yet focused on space travel and the portrayal of scientists in fiction.

Margaret Galvan is Assistant Professor of Visual Rhetoric at the University of Florida. She is at work on a book, In Visible Archives of the 1980s: Feminist Politics and Queer Platforms, under contract with the Manifold Scholarship series of the University of Minnesota Press, which traces a genealogy of queer theory in 1980s feminism through representations of sexuality in visual culture. In addition to the book, she will develop an affiliated digital project on the Manifold Scholarship online platform. Her published work can be found in journals like WSQ, Archive Journal, andAustralian Feminist Studiesand in collections like The Ages of the X-Men (2014) and Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives(2016).

Madeline B. Gangnes is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and an alumna of the University of Dundee’s MLitt in Comics Studies program. Her research focuses on relationships between and among imagetext works and other media, especially with regard to material contexts. She is particularly interested in periodical illustrations and visual adaptations of nineteenth-century British fiction, as well as the visual culture of the Victorian period. She also conducts research related to digital humanities, comics studies and visual rhetoric, book history, film and media studies, science fiction, and climate fiction.

M. Elizabeth Ginway is co-founder of the SFWG and 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.

Sara Gonzalez is Physical Sciences & Mathematics Librarian at the Marston Science Library. She manages a reading collection of science fiction, located on the Library’s 3rd floor, and welcomes all donations and recommendations for purchase.

Gabriela B. Grecca is a PhD student in Literary Studies at São Paulo State University-Araraquara, and a visiting researcher at the University of Florida (2018/2019). Her thesis concentrates on Anglophone and Brazilian dystopias, with a particular interest in ways that canonical and contemporary dystopian fiction deal with the status of arts and culture in their imaginary societies. Her research interests include literature and society, dystopias in English/Portuguese language and Lacanian Materialism, which was the theme of her Master’s thesis.

Terry Harpold is co-founder of the SFWG and Associate Professor in the Department of English. His sf-related scholarship has appeared in journals such as Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne, Galaxies, ImageTexT, IRIS, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Revue Jules Verne, Science Fiction Studies, and Verniana; and in edited collections such as The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2018) and Los viajes extraordinarios de Jules Verne (2018). 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 (2015). He is the Founder and Jury Chair of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts’ annual Walter James Miller Memorial Award for Student Scholarship in the International Fantastic, and Director of IAFA’s annual Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for scholarship in the fantastic published in a language other than English. He is the founder and Director of UF’s Imagining Climate Change initiative.

Tace Hedrick is 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).

Michelle R. Heeg is a recent graduate of the University of Florida, where she received her Master’s degree in Women’s Studies with focuses on feminist science fiction and the participation of women in geek communities. Her research areas include feminist analysis of science fiction literature and media, cultural studies, fan studies, and gender in contemporary video games. Her conference presentations have focused on ambiguous feminism in Battlestar Galactica (2004 series), rethinking the apocalypse, cyborg identities, agency and resistance in role-playing video games, and feminist discourse in geek communities.

Emily Hind is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. She has published interviews with Mexican science fiction writer BEF (Bernardo Fernández), and other Mexican novelists influenced by science fiction and fantasy, such as Karen Chacek, Alberto Chimal, and Bernardo Esquinca. These authors were born in the 1970s and can be found in Hind’s book of interviews, La generación XXX. De Abenshushan a Xoconostle (2013). Other Mexican writers whose work flirts with science fiction, such as Carmen Boullosa and Mario Bellatin, also appear among Hind’s published interviews (see her website for bibliography). Hind’s favorite Mexican science fiction film is Sleep Dealer (El traficante de sueños) and her favorite Mexican science fiction novel is probably Gel azul by BEF. She recommends the anthology edited by BEF, Los viajeros: 25 años de ciencia ficción mexicana as an introduction to contemporary Mexican sci-fi short stories.

Sidney Homan is Professor in the Department of English and UF’s 2019 Teacher/Scholar of the Year. The author of eleven books and editor of five collections of essays on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights, Homan is also an actor and director in professional and university theatres. His most recent book is Comedy Acting for Theatre: The Art and Craft of Performing in Comedies, with the New York director Brian Rhinehart. He has written the libretto for the opera The Golem of Prague, by composer Paul Richards; it will premier in Spring 2020 at the Hippodrome State Theatre.

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.

Danielle Jordan is a PhD student in the Department of English. Her research interests include science fiction, climate fiction, ecocriticism, and environmental rhetoric. She holds a BA in cultural anthropology and spent time working on climate and energy issues in the non-profit sector before coming to UF.

Walter S. Judd is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biology, and holds an affiliate appointment in the Florida Museum of Natural History. His research focuses on the systematics and evolution of the flowering plants. He has published over 230 professional articles and has described numerous new species of plants. He is a co-author of the widely adopted introductory textbook Plant Systematics: A Phylogenetic Approach and Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium, both published by Oxford University Press

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.

Dragan Kujundzic is Professor of Jewish, Germanic and Slavic Studies in the Center for Jewish Studies. He is is the author of over one hundred and twenty articles in critical theory, deconstruction and literary criticism, published in fifteen countries and translated in eight languages, and has edited over twenty special journal issues, article clusters and volumes. His other publications include the monographs Critical Exercises (1983), The Returns of History (1997), Tongue in Heat (2003), and Out of Interculturality (2016).

Mark Law is the Director of UF’s Honors Program and Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  Despite being a lifelong musical theatre buff and a decent baritone, he ended up as an engineer. In part he took this path because of this incredible TV show Star Trek, in which logic, engineering, and science played a huge role in the plot.  He vividly remembers older friends at a High School Science Fiction club introducing him to Clarke, Tolkien, Asimov, and Herbert and the impact of their books.

Corinne Matthews is a PhD student in the Department of English. Her research interests include depictions of sexuality, contraception, and consent in young adult fantasy; Polish children’s literature; and postcolonial theory. She is currently the Coordinator for UF’s Center for Children’s Literature and Culture.

Rebecca McNulty is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, studying science fiction, disaster stories, and the artist. She has presented her research in these areas at multiple conferences, including the Children’s Literature Association, the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and the International James Joyce Conference.

Mitch R. Murray s a PhD candidate in the Department of English. With Mathias Nilges, he is co-editor of Periodizing the Future: William Gibson, Genre, and Cultural History. His writings on science fiction and fantasy appear or are forthcoming in ASAP/Journal, Mediations, and Science Fiction Film and Television.

Erin Prophet is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion. She is a scholar of religion with interests in alternative spirituality, medicine, and environmental ethics. She studies millennialism and apocalypticism in new religious movements as well as the influence of fiction on theology. Among her publications are Prophet’s Daughter: My Life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet Inside Church Universal and Triumphant (2009) and “Charisma and Authority in New Religious Movements,” in the Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements (2016). In addition to her PhD in Religion (Rice University), she has a Master’s degree in public health. She is a co-author with Jeffrey Kripal of the textbook Comparing Religions (2014).

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.

Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig is a faculty member in the UF Health Science Center Library. She teaches health humanities in the College of Medicine and teaches a number of undergraduate classes, including one through the Center for African Studies. She runs the Health Science Center Libraries archives and focuses her history research interests on the history of science and medicine, the study of medical monsters, particularly eugenics and genetics, nature and ecology, and human-animal interactions.

Alfredo Suppia is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Campinas (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, UNICAMP), Brazil, where he coordinates the research group Genecine (Film and AV Genres Research Group / Grupo de Estudos sobre Gêneros Cinematográficos e Audiovisuais) and the Laboratory for Scientific Imagery / Laboratório de Imagem Científica (LIC), His primary areas of research include World Cinemas, Latin-American cinemas, Brazilian film, and science fiction cinema. He is the author of A Metrópole Replicante: Construindo um Diálogo entre Metropolis e Blade Runner (The Replicant Metropolis: Constructing a Dialogue between Metropolis and Blade Runner, 2011), Cinema(s) Independente(s): Cartografias para um Fenômeno Audiovisual Global (Independent Cinema(s): Cartographies for a Global Audiovisual Phenomenon, 2013) and Atmosfera Rarefeita: A Ficção Científica no Cinema Brasileiro (Rarefied Atmosphere: Science Fiction in the Brazilian Cinema, 2013). He is editor of Cartografias para a Ficção Científica Mundial: Cinema e Literatura(Cartographies for World Science Fiction: Cinema and Literature, 2015), Red Alert: Marxist Approaches to Science Fiction Cinema (2016, Ewa Mazierska), and Golpe de Vista: Cinema e Ditadura Militar na América do Sul (At First Glance: Cinema and Military Dictatorship in Soutth America, 2019, with Nuno Cesar Abreu and Marcius Freire).

Karina Vado is a PhD student in the Department of English. She received her Master of Arts from the University of Florida in Women’s Studies. Her primary areas of research include African American and Chicanx/Latinx literary and cultural studies, Latin American and U.S. minority science– and speculative fiction, feminist studies, and utopian studies.

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.

In Memoriam

Donald Ault (PhD, 1968, University of Chicago) taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Vanderbilt University before coming to Florida in 1988. In 1972–74 he initiated curriculum changes at Berkeley by creating English 176 (“Literature and Popular Culture”) and English 177 (“Literature and Philosophy”). At UF he taught courses in Romanticism, in comics, animation, and movie serials, in literary theory, in William Blake, and in literature and science.

With the help of UF students, especially John F. Ronan, Professor Ault organized the first two annual installments of “University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels” – “The Will Eisner Symposium” (2002) and “Underground(s)” (2003). He was Founder and Editor Emeritus of the Department’s open access journal ImageTexT, dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of comics and related media.

His publications include Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (1974) and Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake’s The Four Zoas (1987); he was co-editor of Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method (1987), and editor of Carl Barks: Conversations (2003). He served as consultant and contributor to The Carl Barks Library of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge (1983–90) and The Barks Library in Color (1992–98). His work appeared in journals such as Studies in Romanticism, Modern Philology, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Wordsworth Circle, The Keats-Shelley Journal, and The Comics Journal, as well as in various essay collections, including Comics & Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics (2000). He was was executive producer and editorial supervisor for The Duck Man: An Interview with Carl Barks (1996). A new and expanded version of his first book (Visionary Physics and Other Essays: Blake Newton, and Incommensurable Textuality) appeared in 2003.

Andrew Gordon received his BA from Rutgers in 1965 and his PhD from Berkeley in 1973. He joined the UF faculty since 1975, teaching American Fiction Post-WW II, Jewish-American Fiction, and Science Fiction Literature and Film. He was a Fulbright Lecturer in Spain (1973–75), Portugal (1979), and Yugoslavia (1984–85), a visiting professor of contemporary American Literature in Hungary (1995) and Russia (1997), and an invited lecturer at universities in France, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, and Poland. In the summer of 2001, he taught in the UF program in Rome, and in the spring of 2007 and 2009, in Paris.

Professor Gordon directed UF’s Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts (IPSA) and organized the Institute’s annual International Conference on Literature and Psychology. He co-edited Studies in Jewish American Literature and served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of American Culture.

His publications include An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer (1980); Psychoanalyses/Feminisms, co-edited with Peter Rudnytsky (2000); Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness, co-authored with Hernan Vera (2003); and Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (2008). Professor Gordon’s essays and reviews appeared in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Literature and Psychology, Saul Bellow Journal, and Philip Roth Studies. He published on Jewish-American writers (Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Ozick, and Kosinski), other contemporary writers (Barth and Pynchon), and on contemporary American science fiction and SF films.

A talented writer, visual artist, and sculptor from an early age, Tim Lawrence was a founding member of Imagimation, a creature fabrication, animation, and special effects artists collective in his home town of Jacksonville, Florida. After graduating from the Bolles School, he worked briefly as an animatronics designer for Sally Industries before embarking on an extensive career in Hollywood as an actor, artist, puppeteer, makeup and special effects artist.

His work appeared in numerous television commercials and films, including Aliens, Beetlejuice, Caddyshack II, Ghostbusters I & II, Gremlins 2, Harry and the Hendersons, Howard the Duck, Jurassic Park, Shrek, Starman, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. He was the founder of Conservation Arts, a collaboration with the Jacksonville Zoo that uses life-casting techniques to create bronze sculptures of animals’ bodies to improve accessibility for blind visitors, and 3D printed models for general classroom use. From its inception in 2012 until his death in 2019, Lawrence was a regular and essential participant in the Florida Museum of Natural History’s “Creative B” summer SF film series.