Director’s Update Fall 2024

Congratulations to our recent UCR graduates who completed the SFCS Designated Emphasis: Dr. Brandy Lewis, Dr.  Nicole Furtado, Dr.  Leslie Fernandez, and Dr. Samarth Singhal! Several other doctoral students doing speculative fiction research also defended their dissertations, including Dr. Jasmine Moore and Dr. Summer Sutton!

This Spring, we are welcoming scholars and students to participate in the 2025 Eaton Conference on Speculative Fiction, which will be held here on campus April 4-5. See the Call for Papers here: drive.google.com/file/d/1AVXufNHQQFN00hrpVBOOsl2jMpv5-_ss/view.

This conference is funded by grants from the University of California Humanities Research Initiative (UCHRI) and the Center for Ideas & Society (CIS). This follows the Spring 2024 Eaton Symposium, a hybrid event featuring presentations by graduate and undergraduate students and creative writers, with support from CIS. Congratulations to SFCS grad students K. Persinger, Loren Barbour, Chelsea Yuipco, and Liza Wemakor for planning and executing these incredible programs! Stay tuned for updates.

On January 8, 2025, Jay Kay and Doris Klein Librarian Phoenix Alexander has organized an online Eaton Virtual Symposium that will bring authors, scholars, and alumni together! The keynote speakers are an extraordinary power couple of authors: Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, who have just entrusted the Eaton Collection with their papers for future researchers.

Members of the SFCS faculty steering committee have been busy and creative in the past year!

• Gloria Kim (MCS) published Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the War against Microbial Emergence (Minnesota 2024). She is co-organizing a symposium with UCR ARTS/Getty Pacific Standard Time on operational imaging and imaginaries, upcoming in January 2025. For the 24-25 academic year, Kim is teaching courses on algorithms and everyday life, chemical entanglements and non-human theory, and elemental media. She has also designed a new graduate seminar called "Computation and Embodiment."
   
• Sherryl Vint (ENGL/MCS) co-edited the New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction and helped to direct the Speculative Fiction Across Media conference at Cal State Los Angeles in October. This year she is on a Fulbright fellowship in Poland.
   
• Eric Schwitzgebel (PHIL) published The Weirdness of the World (Princeton 2024) in addition to short stories in Clarkesworld.
   
• Dana Simmons (SEHE) was awarded a Humanities Connections Implementation Grant to develop the undergraduate degree programs in the new department of Society Environment & Health Equity.
   
• andré carrington planned the conference Futurity as Praxis: Learning from Octavia E. Butler at the Huntington Library, with sessions led by UCR professors Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, El/yse Ambrose, Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, and Jasmin Young and attended by numerous UCR students and faculty, and edited the short story collection The Black Fantastic (Library of America, 2025).
   
• In addition, Klein Librarian Phoenix Alexander published short stories in venues including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 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). 

One of the requirements for the graduate Designated Emphasis in Speculative Fictions & Cultures of Science is enrolling for a course of independent study, ENGL 297, in which you complete a research paper under the supervision of a steering committee faculty member or other professor, with the approval of the DE director. Contact Prof. carrington, Prof. Schwitzgebel, Prof. Kim, Prof. Simmons, or Prof. Vint if you’d like to undertake this independent research, and see the documentation here.

Numerous SFCS grad students presented at the Pacific Ancient & Modern Language Association (PAMLA, the regional chapter of the MLA) conference in Palm Springs: Loren Barbour, Arthur Maturo, K. Persinger, Chelsea Yuipco, Liza Wemakor (ENGL), and Yilun Fan (Comp Lit). Nico Valdivia-Henning (Hispanic Studies) undertook a residency in Speculative Play & Just Futurities at Indiana University. Michael Pfirmann-Pugh (ENGL) taught the Media & Cultural Studies course Afrofuturism & The Politics of the Black Superhero over summer 2024. Yuheng Ko (Comp Lit) won the best student paper award at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA). Yilun Fan also won a Support a New Scholar (SNS) award from the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA). 

Our community made numerous connections with the Getty Foundation’s PST ART & Science Collide programs throughout Southern California, including Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-based Image World at UCR ARTS and the ONE Archives at USC exhibit, Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-nation. Our colleagues at UCLA have a film series, Science Fiction Against the Margins, and the Academy Museum opened the exhibit Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures through Cinema.

As director, it’s a great honor to pursue and receive grants with graduate student co-authors from UCHRI and CIS. In Spring 2024, I invited Dr. William Pruitt (UCLA) to deliver a guest lecture on the unique speculations into American history and politics represented by hypothetical Black Presidents in fiction! As part of the English graduate program Open House, we had a guest lecture from Professor David Seitz (Harvey Mudd College), author of A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine. In 2024, I also hosted a visiting scholar, Kosciuszko Foundation fellow Magdalena Dziurzyńska, who (has since completed her PhD at the University of Wroclaw), as she researched same-sex utopias in speculative fiction. This academic year, I am working with a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Debbie Duarte, who is researching haunting, technology, and coloniality in the US/Mexico borderlands.

Over the course of the next year, I’ll be working to extend the Science and Technology Studies Initiative led by Professors Yolanda Moses (ANTH) and Linda Hall (Liberal Studies). One of the goals is an undergraduate minor in STS – a timely successor to our SFCS minor. I’ll also be formally inviting faculty from the new department of Black Study to our steering committee. 

Watch this space!