Centre for Science Fiction & Fantasy Postgrad Researchers’ Seminar

Centre for Science Fiction & Fantasy Postgrad Researchers’ Seminar

What: Five PhD researchers from AHSS working in the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy will give 10- to 15-minute talks about their research and findings on a variety of topics within the genres. There will be a Q&A time after each speaker and a break between speakers. Please join us (with your own at-home bevvies!) to hear what our research students are discovering, what they’re writing, and where they’re taking SFF.

When: Tuesday, October 20, 2020, from 17.00-19.00

Where: MS Teams (RSVP to tiffani.angus@aru.ac.uk for a join code)

Meet our PhD Researchers working in SFF who will be speaking on Tuesday!

 

Mike Gibas, a Creative Writing PhD student, is working on his dissertation “Stan & Jack: Writing a neo-classical biopic screenplay with practice-led research, to explore and understand the cultural power of ‘Origin Stories’ in film.” His presentation will be about the challenges of writing a biopic about two of science fiction’s most influential creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and the connections between life stories and origin stories.

 

 

 

 

Ginger Lee Thomason, who is nearing submission of her Creative Writing PhD, is in the final edits of her cross-genre novel How to Cook a Dragon (described as “Masterchef in Middle Earth with an urban fantasy subplot”) and its accompanying commentary “Food and Cheer and Prose: The Gastronomy of Fantastic Literature”. She will be discussing the food-focused infrastructures of subcreation—Nature, Culture, Language, and Philosophy and Mythology—and, as in the Primary World, explain how the food cultures of fantastic literature can be explored through these systems.

 

 

Eyal Soffer, an English Literature PhD student, is working on “The Influence of Machiavelli on selected fantasy and science fiction texts: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Frank Herbert’s Dune series, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor series, and Kameron Hurley’s Bel Dame Apocrypha series.” He will be presenting some initial findings and analysis in his exploration of Machiavelli’s language of power politics and its reflection in the text listed.

 

 

 

Amber A. Logan, who is nearing submission of her Creative Writing PhD dissertation, is researching the intersection between techno-animism, fairy tales, shadows, and Japanese culture for her thesis titled “Men Who Lose Their Shadows–from Hans Christian Andersen to Haruki Murakami: A Slipstream Novel and Contextualising Commentary.” She will be discussing how she tied together the disparate threads of fantastic elements and a near-future setting in her slipstream novel The Shadow of Kagetaka Mori.

 

Powder Thompson, who is nearing his writing-up year on a Creative Writing PhD, will be submitting a fantasy novel, Secondhand Destiny, along with a commentary on the goblin market trope and the identification and use of tropes in fantastic fiction. He will be discussing the framework he developed to help recognize the appearance of tropes across various media, and how that framework can be employed to break down and understand the uses of a trope (including subverting it) within a narrative.

 

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