Scenes from a previous life, or: I was an academic once
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American Haunting
In Spring 2021, I taught a course at UNC about haunting in 20th century American literature. (Syllabus here.)
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Telling Stories about the Byrd Antarctic Expedition
Antarctica and the dubious legacy of Antarctic research and exploration (both in itself and as part of an even longer and more dubious legacy of polar “exploration” by white Westerners in general) has been a long-time obsession of mine. In 2017 and 2019, I was lucky enough to do archival research at the Byrd Polar Research Center at OSU. I gave a talk about my research in 2020. My as-yet-unnamed SF project inspired by that research is in progress.
You can read more (and watch my talk) at the Byrd Polar Research and Climate Center history corner: “Who was the ‘ghostwriter’ for the Byrd Second Antarctic Expedition?”
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Jack Finney and the Crisis of the Self in 1950s America
Back when I was an academic, I wrote an article about Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the midcentury anxieties about the self that was published in Foundation, the research journal of the Science Fiction Foundation.