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.

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

* The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction has a pre-order page! Open your wallets! Contact your local librarian! Get your Hugo nomination ballots ready!

* It’s a shame about Joan Rivers. The documentary about her is great. She was good on the Nerdist podcast too.

* Amazing, astounding: The Eaton Collection just got a $3.5 million gift.

* Through its increasing corporatization in the last two decades, the university in the United States has implemented an organizational ideology that has created a climate unfavorable for women faculty. By overvaluing and intensifying managerial principles, the university in the United States has strengthened discursive masculinity and has worsened women faculty’s likelihood of professional advancement. Consequently, the adoption and implementation of managerialism in higher education in the United States is a question of gender equity for the academic profession. Feminist educational scholars have been relatively quiet on the growth of managerialism in the university and its impact on gender equity. In particular, feminist scrutiny of managerialism’s discursive masculinity and its effects on gender equity in the university has been lacking. This conceptual article presents a feminist analysis of managerialism and its implications for women faculty in the United States; it examines how managerial culture and practices adopted by universities have revived, reinforced, and deepened the discourse of masculinity.

* inconsequential research kills don’t inconsequential research today

* The future’s just a little bit janky: Awesome Home-Built Elysium Exoskeleton Lifts 170 Pounds Like Nothing.

* The Freedom to Starve: The New Job Economy.

* California is the state of sunshine, movie stars— and Supermax prisons.

* This 3D-rendered Spider-Woman will haunt your dreams.

* People don’t like Spider-Woman’s butt because of Islam, says illustrator.

* The coming student debt apocalypse.

* The arc of history is long, but: Rams Cut Sam, First Drafted Openly Gay Player.

* In four federal lawsuits, including one that is on appeal, and more than a half-dozen investigations over the past decade, colleagues of Darren Wilson’s have separately contested a variety of allegations, including killing a mentally ill man with a Taser, pistol-whipping a child, choking and hog-tying a child and beating a man who was later charged with destroying city property because his blood spilled on officers’ clothes.

* When police catch “contagious shooting.” Even When Police Do Wear Cameras, Don’t Count on Seeing the Footage. Police Body Cameras Don’t Address the Real Problem: Police.

* Cop Charged With Sexually Assaulting Eight Women Under Threat of Arrest.

* All about how airlines cancel flights. Okay, but listen, I’m still mad.

* Headlines from the Anthropocene: Drought-Stricken California Makes Historic Move To Regulate Underground Water For The First Time. Are You Ready for a 35-Year Drought?

* Cataclysm in suburbia: The dark, twisted history of America’s oil-addicted middle class.

* The Moon Landing Went Far Better Than the Practice Landing.

* A previously unpublished chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

* Astronomers Discover A Planetary Impact Outside Our Own Solar System.

* And a radical communist provocation to shake your delicate sensibilities to the core: Shaking Down the Elderly for Student Loan Debt Should Not Be Allowed.

Monday Morning Links

* CFP: SFRA 2015: The SF We Don’t (Usually) See: Suppressed Histories, Liminal Voices, Emerging Media.

* CFP: Paradoxa: The Futures Industry.

* Concerned about the Eaton SF/F archive at UCR.

*Ferguson, Missouri Community Furious After Teen Shot Dead By Police. Family of Michael Brown, Teenager Shot to Death By Ferguson Police, Talks About His Life. Michael Brown remembered as a ‘gentle giant.’ Now, riots.

* 1 Black Man Is Killed Every 28 Hours by Police or Vigilantes: America Is Perpetually at War with Its Own People.

* Meanwhile the NYPD is free to lie with impunity after an illegal chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death.

* An officer fired the electric shock device’s darts into the chest of the girl, who weighed 70 pounds, the lawsuit said.

* Black Life, Annotated. Further reading.

* Life as a victim of stalking.

* The Obligation to Know: From FAQ to Feminism 101.

Abstract: In addition to documenting and sharing information geek culture has a complementary norm obliging others to educate themselves on rudimentary topics. This obligation to know is expressed by way of jargon-laden exhortations such as ‘check the FAQ’ (frequently asked questions) and ‘RTFM’ (read the fucking manual). Additionally, the geek lexicon includes designations of the stature of the knower and the extent of what he or she knows (e.g., alpha geek and newbie). Online feminists, especially geek feminists, are similarly beset by naive or disruptive questions and demonstrate and further their geekiness through the deployment of the obligation to know. However, in this community the obligation reflects the increased likelihood of disruptive, or ‘derailing’, questions and a more complex and gendered relationship with stature, as seen in the notions of impostor syndrome, the Unicorn Law, and mansplaining.

* Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction.

* What Makes Nigel Richards The Best Scrabble Player On Earth.

* What It’s Like to be a Doctor in a Supermax Prison.

* Teaching The Merchant of Venice in Gaza.

* Inside online communities for non-offending pedophiles.

* While emailing with a colleague yesterday, I realized that I had never really written about the so-called “spacecraft cemetery” of the South Pacific, a remote patch of ocean water used as a kind of burial plot for derelict satellites.

* Dispute Between Amazon and Hachette Takes an Orwellian Turn. Amazon Gets Increasingly Nervous. In which Amazon calls you to defend the realm.

* What happens when a female writer asks a question on Twitter about women’s health.

* BREAKING: The NCAA Still Doesn’t Care About Athletes. The lawsuit that could change everything. The NCAA in Turmoil. How the O’Bannon Ruling Could Change College Sports.

* “The alternative to partition,” he said, “is a continued U.S.-led effort at nation-building that has not worked for the last four years and, in my view, has no prospect for success. That, Mr. Chairman, is a formula for war without an end.”

* World War I, as Paul Fussell famously argued, discredited what Wilfred Owen in a classic poem called “the old lie”: that it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country. But what it has meant to shift allegiances from nation to “humanity” has changed drastically over the 20th century among those flirting with wider and cosmopolitan sensibilities. Namely, the highest goal shifted from the abolition to the humanization of war.

* Nothing Says “Sorry Our Drones Hit Your Wedding Party” Like $800,000 And Some Guns.

* Scenes From COCAL: A Conference for Contingent Faculty Looks to Seize Its Moment.

* Why Does the United States Have 17 Different Intelligence Agencies?

* Why not a three-day work week?

* What was it like to be on Supermarket Sweep?

* I was told on numerous occasions that I was going to face a general court martial on six or seven charges. Then word came down from Washington to discharge me quietly. An honourable discharge. Maybe the thinking was that the peace movement didn’t need a martyr.

* Yes, the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless.

* Elon Musk Reveals Open Source Design for 14,000 Mile-an-Hour Vacuum Tube Railroad.

* So much dBilown the memory hole: Reconsidering the Legacy of Bill Clinton.

* Philip K. Dick’s only children’s book finally back in print – with many subtle nods to his most famous SF work. But not in the US!

* Where’s the Diversity, Hollywood? Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blockbusters Overwhelmingly White, Male.

* John Oliver’s Search for New Voices in Late Night.

* The New York Public Library’s hilarious archive of librarians’ harsh children’s book reviews.

* Peter Frase talks Vonnegut’s Player Piano on the Old Mole Variety Hour.

* The A.V. Club is celebrating Clone High.

* Party Like It’s 1999: Japanese Retrofuturism and Chrono Trigger.

* One of the weirdest episodes of Star Trek ever.

* Critical Theory after the Anthropocene.

* Tennessee Drug Tests Welfare Applicants, Discovers Less Than One Percent Use Drugs.

* Drilling Company Owner Gets 28 Months In Prison For Dumping Fracking Waste Into River. Sad that this would be so shocking.

* The Scott Walker Hypothesis. The Scott Walker Paradox.

* Giant urban sprawl could pave over thousands of acres of forest and agriculture, connecting Raleigh to Atlanta by 2060, if growth continues at its current pace, according to a newly released research paper from the U.S. Geological Survey.

* Island In Upstate New York Taken Over By Cats.

* Dream to revolutionize ostrich industry crumbles.

* What could possibly go wrong? Armed Right-Wing Militias Amassing Along Texas Border With State Lawmaker’s Blessing.

* But it’s not all bad news: Yellowstone Is Not Erupting And Killing Us All.

Last Night’s Links Have Already Been Superseded; Progress Inevitably Marches On

* Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowship at the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Literature at the University of California, Riverside.

* A husband and wife running a private Milwaukee voucher school that abruptly closed last month — after accepting a total of more than $2.3 million in taxpayer money — now live in a gated community in Florida by the beach, records show.

* Congratulations, Milwaukee, #4 on a random Internet “places to go” list.

* Sorry Lindsey: The constant focus on accusing current faculty of corruption and current graduate students of contemptible delusion makes no sense, analytically or politically.

* Poverty in the Ivy Tower. An MLA Story.

* A Conference of One’s Own: A Report from the MLA Subconference.

* Unemployed, Miserable Man Still Remembers Teacher Who First Made Him Fall In Love With Writing.

* It’s the donor class, not the public, who oppose serious efforts at addressing poverty and inequality. There are many barriers to overcome, but widespread public opposition isn’t one of them.

* There is no way to ever fix Social Security and Medicare ever ever ever.

* Kim Stanley Robinson vs. the Booker Prize.

* Gasp! Silicon Valley May Not Be A Utopia For Workers After All.

* And nobody’s perfect: The New York Times Had A Mistake On Its Front Page Every Day For More Than 100 Years.

Sci-Fi Heaven

In my travels yesterday I discovered the existence of the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection at UC Riverside, the world’s largest collection of science fiction and fantasy literature at over 11,000 books. Nerd Mecca.