Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowship in Science Fiction Studies
The Mullen Fellowship offers stipends of up to $3000 per applicant to support research at any archive that has sf holdings pertinent to the dissertation topic. The program was instituted to honor Richard “Dale” Mullen, founder of Science Fiction Studies.
Qualified applicants will be PhD students from any accredited doctoral program who are pursuing an approved dissertation topic in which science fiction (broadly defined) is a major emphasis. The research may involve science fiction of any nation or culture and of any era. Applications may propose research in—but need not limit themselves to—specialized sf archives such as the Eaton Collection at UCR, the Maison d’Ailleurs in Switzerland, the Judith Merril Collection in Toronto, or the SF Foundation Collection in Liverpool. Proposals for work in general archives with relevant sf holdings—authors’ papers, for example—are also welcome. For possible research locations, applicants may wish to consult the partial list of sf archives compiled in SFS 37.2 (July 2010): 161-90. This list is also available online at: <http://sfanthology.site.wesleyan.edu/files/2010/08/WASF-Teachers-Guide-2Archives.pdf>.
The application should be written in English and should describe the dissertation, clarifying the centrality of science fiction to the project’s overall design. It should show knowledge of the specific holdings and strengths of the archive in which the proposed research will be conducted, and it should provide a work-plan and budget. Candidates should clarify why research in this particular archive is crucial to the proposed project. Students who receive awards must acknowledge the support provided by SFS’s Mullen Fellowship program in their completed dissertations and in any published work that makes use of research supported by the fellowship.
A complete application consists of a project description (approximately 500 words) with a specific plan of work, updated curriculum vitae, itemized budget, and two letters of reference, including one from the faculty supervisor of the dissertation.
Applications should be submitted electronically to the chair of the evaluation committee, Sherryl Vint, at sherryl.vint@gmail.com. Applications are due April 1, 2016 and awards will be announced May 1, 2015.
The selection committee in 2015-16 consists of Neil Easterbrook and DeWitt Douglas Kilgore (SFSAdvisory Board members) and Carol McGuirk and Sherryl Vint, SFS editors.
Monday Links! Quite a Few!
* I had a review of Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest in The Los Angeles Review of Books last week. Can’t wait for Death’s End.
* “Star Trek style teleportation would take billions of years.” Not if you reverse the polarity of the inertial dampeners, you nitwits!
* The same website has a piece hyping cryonics, so you know it’s legit.
* Meanwhile: AI ‘could leave half of world unemployed.’
* Trek at 50: The quest for a unifying theory of time travel in Star Trek.
* The Discovery of Gravitational Waves. Gravitational Waves and Neoliberalism.
* The Mount St. Mary’s situation is even more astounding than you’d think when you refocus attention back on the “culling” survey itself. A Violation of Trust. From embarrassing to appalling to surreal. Twenty-first-century legal paradoxes: You can’t re-hire me, I wasn’t legally fired.
* Cleveland Files Claim Against Tamir Rice’s Family For Unpaid EMS Bill.
* Fathers and Childless Women in Academia Are 3x More Likely to Get Tenure Than Women With Kids.
* The Crisis Facing America’s Working Daughters.
* For gifted children, being intelligent can have dark implications.
* Antonin Scalia, in memoriam.
* The end of SCOTUS. Laying out the recent vote totals like that really does give credence, alas, to the idea that Democrats started it and now Republicans are going to finish it.
* Term Limit the Supreme Court. Don’t Term Limit the Supreme Court. No, I Mean It, Term Limit the Supreme Court.
* The end of Louisiana. Worth it for, what, fourteenth place in the GOP primary?
* A Rallying Cry for A Second-Chance School: The Fight to Save Chicago State.
* Antitrust Case Against Duke and UNC May Move Forward.
* Schools Are Doing a Terrible Job Teaching Your Kids About Global Warming.
* Climate and Empire. (Sounds like a book Asimov would write today if he were still alive.)
* How this company tracked 16,000 Iowa caucus-goers via their phones.
* “Killing a million people was just the sort of thing a superpower had to do.”
* Bernie Sanders and Palestine. The Washington Post found a political scientists who thinks he wouldn’t get blown out. Could Superdelegates Really Stop Bernie Sanders? Clinton now managing exceptions in Nevada, and has shockingly few staffers in South Carolina. And it’s fine. It’s fine.
* Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department. To be fair, though, those don’t seem super hard to get.
* The skills gap: still a fraud to lower labor costs.
* The Internet ruins everything, even Jeopardy!.
* From the nice-work-if-you-can-get-it files: Concordia executive gets $235,000 in severance after 90 days on the job. No public bidding on major University of Nebraska contracts. Michigan Coach’s jet travel valued at more than $10,000 a day.
* Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina: They found BoShek. Hyperspace Maps, Graphs, and Trees.
* Are you an academic superhero?
* Adjuncts and/as freelancers.
* Why So Few American Indians Earn Ph.D.’s, and What Colleges Can Do About It.
* When Is Campus Hate Speech No Longer Protected Speech?
* The Coen Brothers and the defeat of the American left. I knew it was them.
* Marvel’s The Vision Is Telling a Story Unlike Any Superhero Comic I’ve Ever Read.
* Day late, buck short: Suffragette valentines.
* The EPA calls it the most severe exposure to a hazardous material in American history. The only people in Libby, Montana, who didn’t see it coming were the victims, who are dying to know if it’s really possible to poison an entire town and get away with it.
* “I’m too old to do things I don’t enjoy”: An interview with Margaret Atwood.
* And SMBC catches on to my philosophical method.
Wednesday Links!
* Really good news on the Trek front: Bryan Fuller will be showrunner.
* Bernie, basking in the glow of the victory. 21 Gifts For The Bernie Sanders Supporter In Your Life. Demographics, y’all. The last time someone won New Hampshire by 20 points and didn’t win the nomination. All uphill from here. Even the neoliberal Matt Yglesias. How Hillary Clinton Gets the Coverage She Wants. Nice work if you can get it. And on the other side of the aisle: Never forget.
* Chaos at Mount St. Mary’s. “An Appalling Breach of Faith.” Sign the petition.
* Wheaton College, Larycia Hawkins to ‘Part Ways.’
* Permanent emergency at Berkeley.
* Congress Again Scrutinizes Colleges With Big Endowments.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 25 3/4: “Residences.”
* Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever?
* Why Twitter Is Fundamentally Broken.
* A brief history of Marquette’s Joan of Arc Chapel.
* My Encounter with the Princeton Police and Its Aftermath.
* Twilight of Michael Jackson’s Chimp, Bubbles.
* Who planted drugs in the PTA mom’s car?
* The Supreme Court Just Gave The Finger To Obama’s Plan To Slow Climate Change.
* Mark Strand: “After Our Planet.”
* A Producer Is Tweeting Descriptions of Women from Movie Scripts and It’s Hilariously Awful.
* Inaccessible: what I should have said in my review of The Witness.
* When disabled people need not apply.
* Why and How DC Keeps Screwing Up Superman.
* I still don’t know if Ta-Nehisi Coates is right about Bernie and reparations, but I’m in for as many issues of Black Panther as he wants to do.
* And speaking of: How an Ex-Slave Successfully Won a Case for Reparations in 1783.
* Sabrina Alli on Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law.
* “Cold War modernism,” then, doesn’t refer to experimental artwork produced between the end of World War II and the Reagan administration, but to “the deployment of modernist art as a weapon of Cold War propaganda by both governmental and unofficial actors as well as to the implicit and explicit understanding of modernism underpinning that deployment.” And, given the archive from which Barnhisel works, this book doesn’t provide Cold War–flavored interpretations of individual modernist works. Instead, it offers an evenhanded explanation of the changing connotation of the term “modernism” as the federal agencies and private foundations listed above sought out an antonym for (Soviet) realism. With this in mind — the afterlife of modernism, instead of its genealogy — the Cold War modernists of the title do not seem to be the painters, sculptors, poets, and novelists who produced the original works, but instead the “governmental and unofficial actors” who produced the federally subsidized midcentury reinterpretation of both individual works and modernism in general, in the name of Cold War politics.
* Chicago’s troubled public school system on Wednesday had to slash the size of one of the biggest “junk” bond offerings the municipal market has seen in years and agree to pay interest costs rivaling Puerto Rico’s in order to lure investors into the deal.
* The controversy over J.K. Rowling’s new African wizard school, explained. Pottermania, round two.
* Jughead comes out as asexual.
* A player after my own heart: “This strategy involves the use of rules that many people don’t know about, and having the rulebook nearby will speed up the process of dealing with the numerous complaints you’ll receive during the game.”
* Wausau man arrested twice in child sex stings 3 weeks apart. Reminds me of a clip from To Catch a Predator that made the viral media rounds a few years ago.
* Cop who killed college student and 55-year-old mother sues for ‘extreme emotional trauma.’
* Winning a competition predicts dishonest behavior, or, #academicjobmarket.
* “A good start”: FBI Arrests Nearly Every Single Elected Official In A Texas Town.
* Classic whoopsies on The Hateful Eight set.
* Of course you had me at “Lord of the Rings-inspired space opera wants to connect you with African mythology.”
* Truly a Road to Damascus moment: “66-Year-Old Man Struck By Lightning While Masturbating to Bible.”
* You thought 90s nostalgia had gone too far before, but it’s definitely too far now.
* Long Seventies Conspiracy Cinema: An Introduction.
* That Dragon, Cancer and how the digital age talks about death.
* Meet the New Student Activists. A Timeline of Black Activism on Campus.
* Birds of prey spread bush fires deliberately.
* Gender in the classroom. The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job A pplicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study.
* From Annihilation to Acceptance: A Writer’s Surreal Journey.
* And let us now praise famous men: “3 siblings picking up their daily allowance of bottled water from the Fire Dept in Flint, MI.”
SCIENCE FICTION FILM AND TELEVISION – Open Call for Papers!
Science Fiction Film and Television continues to invite submissions for upcoming issues. Preferred length for articles is approximately 7000-9000 words; all topics related to science fiction film, television, and related media will be considered. Typical response time is within three months. Check the journal website at Liverpool University Press for full guidelines for contributors; please direct any individualized queries to gerry.canavan@marquette.edu.
Saturday Morning Links!
* All jokes work the same way.
* Protecting UW-Madison faculty from poaching cost $8 million. I realized just now though that these retention leaks are ultimately about trying to put a dollar sign on detenurization, as well as shift responsibility for the changes from the admin who forced them to the “star” faculty who acceded to them.
* What is love to a scab? Hillary Rodham, Bill Clinton, and the 1971 Yale Strike.
* Travelling to work ‘is work’, European court rules. This has been on my mind lately as I’ve heard of multiple Marquette employees being struck by cars in recent weeks as they walked from the parking garage to their offices.
* The Lives and Lies of a Professional Impostor.
* An Obscure Law From the ’70s Is Being Used to Toss Innocent People Out of Their Homes.
An obscure law from the 1970s is being used by the NYPD to boot people from their homes and businesses when they are suspected of crimes, often in cases where no charges are ever filed. The move is called a “nuisance abatement,” and there are more than 1,000 such actions a year, nearly half of them residential and many that are permanent evictions, according to an investigation by the New York Daily News and ProPublica.
* How an 1830s Children’s Magazine Taught Hard Truths About Slavery.
* Meet the Black Architect Who Designed Duke University 37 Years Before He Could Have Attended It.
* ‘Jim’ll Paint It’ Is The Best New Service On The Internet.
* The 27 Worst Things about Going to Stock Photo University.
* Lesbian SFF Recommendation Master List.
* And the arc of history is long, but female British Airlines employees may now wear pants to work.
Weekendin’!
* Posted earlier this morning: The Lives of Animals, Part Two and My Upcoming Courses at Marquette. And apropos of that second link, and today’s start of Infinite Winter: Everything About Everything: David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ at 20.
* CFP for the the second issue of the Museum of Science Fiction’s new journal. Special Issue on Online Misogyny: Call for Papers.
* Your Dissertation Begins in Your First Seminar.
* Chicago State U Declares Financial Exigency.
* Study shows Wisconsin suffered second highest decrease in higher education in nation.
* UC Berkeley faculty members are buzzing over news that University of California President Janet Napolitano ordered the installation of computer hardware capable of monitoring all e-mails going in and out of the UC system. More from Remaking the University.
* J.K. Rowling announces four new wizarding schools you’ll never get to attend. On Uagadou, the African Wizarding School.
* The President says he’s talking about opportunities, but he’s also talking about outcomes. It’s one thing to want all kids to have access to advanced classes, music instruction, sports teams and volunteer work. It’s another to expect them to take advantage of all of them at the same time. President Obama described Antonio as “doing his part” with his full load of curricular and extracurricular activities, but every student can’t be prepared for college: There just aren’t enough seats. Because admission is limited and competitive, only the top two-thirds or so can be, by definition, prepared for higher education. No matter how hard they work, how brilliant they are, the lowest-scoring cohort will be labeled unprepared and accused of not “doing their part.”
* The university in ruins: The number of job postings the AHA received in 2014-15 was down 8 percent from the prior year. This is the third straight year for which the association is reporting a decline. Job listings are down 45 percent from the 1,064 that the association reported in 2011-12.
* How impossible is it for Democrats to win back the House? This impossible.
* Disabled people need not apply.
* Good News! China Miéville Has Written a Bad Book. Either way I’m still really looking forward to The Last Days of New Paris.
* How Long Could the U.S. Go Without Electricity?
* We’ll never know for sure exactly what The Owl In Daylight would have looked like had Philip lived to put the story to paper, but it sounds like it would have been a rare happy ending in the Dick canon. “He considered this a sort of capstone to his career,” Tessa says. “The first novel that ends on a note of hope and love.”
* The 27th Amendment Was Ratified Primarily for Revenge.
* Wife crashes her own funeral, horrifying her husband, who had paid to have her killed.
* Matt Yglesias is Making Sense: This is a party that has no viable plan for winning the House of Representatives, that’s been pushed to a historic low point in terms of state legislative seats, and that somehow lost the governor’s mansions in New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois.
It’s a party, in other words, that was clearly in need of some dialogue, debate, and contestation over what went wrong and how to fix it. But instead of encouraging such a dialogue, the party tried to cut it off.
* Fan theory of the week: “Leia was sent to Tatooine not only to recruit Obi-Wan but also to be trained as a Jedi.”
* Game of the week: From the makers of the fantastic rymdkapsel, Twofold, Inc.
* The MLArcade: Ten Multimedia Projects on the Rhetoric of Pinball.
* Foucault That Noise: The Terror of Highbrow Mispronunciation.
* English is Surprisingly Devoid of Emotionally Positive Words.
* ‘Hundreds’ of masked men beat refugee children in Stockholm.
* Uriel, the Universe’s Best-Dressed Spiritual Leader.
* An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him.
* ‘Eyewash’: How the CIA deceives its own workforce about operations.
* We Shall Overcome: An Oral History of the Bernie Sanders Folk Album.
* MIT Dean Takes Leave to Start New University Without Lectures or Classrooms. Or professors…
* Earth is actually two planets, scientists conclude. BUT FOR HOW LONG.
* Equation shows that large-scale conspiracies would quickly reveal themselves.
* “Homicides soar in Milwaukee, along with many theories on cause.”
* The next Flint, Michigan, could be a suburb.
* How the original Star Wars trilogy fooled everyone with matte paintings.
* New horizons in cycling cheating.
* Unemployed, Myanmar’s Elephants Grow Antsy, and Heavier.
* $8 Billion Ponzi Scheme in China.
* And I truly find every aspect of this just totally mind-boggling: At Simon Fraser U, professors were stunned by video university posted on its website that suggested female faculty members could be viewed as sex objects — in the name of saving energy.
The Lives of Animals, Part Two
My capstone students and I have come up with the post-Spring-Break schedule for my The Lives of Animals course. Trying to incorporate all the major areas of interest in the room, we sort of orbited around a couple major overlapping segments: animals in captivity (March 29-April 7) shading into animal fantasy (April 5 and April 7) and animal cognition (April 7 and April 12) shading into Kurt Vonnegut’s apocalyptic anticipation of the Anthropocene, Galápagos (April 14 to the end of the course):
| Mar. 29 | Kathy Rudy, “Where the Wild Things Ought to Be: Sanctuaries, Zoos, and Exotic Pets” [D2L]
possible trip to the Milwaukee Zoo or Jo-Dons Farm |
|
| Th | Mar. 31 | John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” [AR]
Randy Malamud “Zoo Spectatorship” [AR] |
| T | Apr. 5 | Blackfish
Finding Nemo and Finding Dory
after class: Résumé Doctor and Interview Bootcamp! Details TBA |
| Th | Apr. 7 | Blackfish and Finding Nemo discussion continues
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, “Grief, Sadness, and the Bones of Elephants” [AR] |
| T | Apr. 12 | Tim Flannery, “The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals” [Web]
Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds (excerpt) [D2L] Marc Bekoff, “Wild Justice and Fair Play: Cooperation, Forgiveness, and Morality in Animals” [AR] |
| Th | Apr. 14 | Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos, chapters 1-18 |
| T | Apr. 19 | Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos, chapters 19-34 |
| Th | Apr. 21 | Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos, whole book |
| T | Apr. 26 | RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS |
| Th | Apr. 28 | RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS |
| T | May 3 | RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS |
| Th | May 5 | RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS |
| Th | May 13 | FINAL PAPER DUE VIA D2L DIGITAL DROPBOX BY 10 AM |
I’m pretty excited for this.
