Director’s Update Fall 2025

Last year featured some wonderful events, virtual and in person, and great developments in scholarship from participants in our program.

In Winter 2025, Jay Kay and Doris Klein Librarian Phoenix Alexander organized an online Eaton Virtual Symposium that featured keynote speakers Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, as well as Jaymee Goh, Astrid Behr, and Charlie Jane Anders among other extraordinary scholars and authors. The Eaton Symposium returns online in January 2026, with award-winning science fiction author and translator Ken Liu as the keynote speaker!

In Spring 2024, we convened the 2025 Eaton Conference on Speculative Fiction: Reimagining the Archive. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of SFCS grad students K. Persinger, Chelsea Mae-Yuipco, Loren Barbour, and Liza Wemakor, the UCR Libraries, and support from UCHRI and the Center for Ideas & Society (CIS), we held a two-day in-person conference and brought the program to many more attendees via livestream. A hearty thank you and congratulations to everyone who attended and viewed proceedings online! Video from the conference panels is available on the UCR Library YouTube channel.

Graduate students undertaking the SFCS Designated Emphasis participated in conferences including the Pacific Ancient & Modern Language Association (PAMLA) in San Francisco.

Faculty affiliated with the SFCS emphasis have been busy and creative in the past year!

• Sherryl Vint (English/Media and Cultural Studies) completed a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Warsaw, and will be teaching ENGL 179A: History of Science Fiction, focused on artificial intelligence. Graduate students are welcome to enroll (for additional graduate-level credits, register for ENGL 290 simultaneously). 
• Eric Schwitzgebel (Philosophy) will be teaching PHIL 134: Philosophy of Mind in Spring 2026, with options for graduate students to enroll. Students interested in speculative fiction and cultures of science may be interested in the questions of consciousness, artificial life, and extraterrestrial intelligence raised in the course. Prof. Schwitzgebel also published a story in Fusion Fragment, and a story previously in Clarkesworld was selected for Think Weirder 1: World's Best Science Fiction Ideas. His new book on AI and Consciousness is forthcoming from Cambridge, and you can read it on arXiv. 
• Dana Simmons (Society, Environment, and Health Equity) will be teaching SEHE 129: Food Justice in Spring quarter 2026, and graduate students are welcome to enroll (along with additional credits for graduate-level study.) Also in SEHE, Professor Chikako Takeshita will be teaching SEHE 123: Gender and Science in Spring.
• andré carrington (English) published “Hard Vacuum: Black Women Space Workers Femme the Future,” in Science Fiction Film and Television, and completed a new book, Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination, coming in Spring from Fordham University Press.
• Professor Sage Ni'Ja Whitson (Black Study) published the book Transtrarrestrial: Dark Matter and Black Divinities with Wesleyan University Press and opened a new exhibit at the California African American Museum, These Walking Glories, which will be open through April 5, 2026. Professor Whitson was also awarded a fellowship from Dance/USA which supports arts advocacy, research, and engagement.
• Professor Weihsin Gui (English) edited a special issue of Science Fiction Studies and published an article in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, “Spaces of refugeetude in Matt Huynh’s Vietnamese Australian comics.”  Professor Gui also convened numerous events, including a symposium on New Work in Australian Speculative Fiction Studies (watch video here), a talk by award-winning author Merlinda Bobis, and on December 3, 2025, a conversation with the creators of the Singaporean comic Tiger Girls. 
• Dr. Phoenix Alexander (Klein Librarian) published short stories in venues including The Dark and Uncharted, and edited issue 300 of Vector: the Journal of the British Science Fiction Association, and published a book chapter on queer zines in the forthcoming anthology Queer Print Cultures (U Toronto Press). Coming soon, Phoenix has a chapter on genre in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance.

In other excellent news for our fellow scholars, Science Fiction Studies is now published by University of California Press. The first UC Press issue was Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction as Slipstream, edited by our own Professor Weihsin Gui. 

Watch this space for news on the relaunch of the SFCS Book Prize!

Stay tuned for 2026 events, including the Virtual Eaton Symposium and a roundtable discussion on Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein in January 2026. 

The World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) will take place in nearby Anaheim, California, in August 2026! Read all about it, and join if you can - the convention program is taking shape!

Seminars that confer credit for the graduate Designated Emphasis in Speculative Fictions & Cultures of Science are listed on this site, but you can substitute appropriate coursework with approval from the director. Contact your degree program’s graduate advisor for instructions. One of the requirements for the graduate emphasis is enrolling for a course of independent study (designated by the course number 297 in your department, like ENGL 297 in English) in which you complete a research paper under the supervision of a steering committee faculty member or other professor. Contact Prof. carrington, Prof. Schwitzgebel, Prof. Simmons, Prof. Kim, or Prof. Vint if you’d like to undertake this independent research, and see the documentation here.