Brian Attebery, “Burning Harry Potter and Other Ways of Misreading Fantasy”

We are pleased to welcome Professor Brian Attebery, the current Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow, to the Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy. He will be delivering a talk open to all titled, “Burning Harry Potter and Other Ways of Misreading Fantasy.”

Where: Anglia Ruskin, LAB 109

When: Wednesday, January 23, 3:00-5:00 pm

About Brian Attebery

Professor Attebery’s first scholarly publication was on Emily Dickinson, but he soon turned away from canonical topics. Since that first effort, he has written on fantasy, science fiction, Disney films, utopias, children’s literature, gender, and interdisciplinarity. His article on Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and the theoretical basis for their pioneering work in American Studies appeared in American Quarterly in 1996. Along with collaborators Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler, he edited the groundbreaking Norton Book of Science Fiction, which is used in many science fiction courses around the country; he also wrote a teacher’s guide to the volume. In 1991 he received the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts and won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies a year later. He was named ISU’s Distinguished Researcher in 1997 and was given an award for Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities by the Idaho Humanities Council in 2004. The Science Fiction Research Association gave him its Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction and fantasy criticism in 2009.