About
About Jason W. Ellis
My name is Jason Woodrow Ellis, and I have been going to school for a very long time. I began my studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1995 as a physics major. It took a number of years, but through a series of unexpected happy events, namely working with Lisa Yaszek, being an inaugural member of the Science/Fiction Laboratory, and having a life-changing conversation in 2004 with the science fiction author Kathleen Ann Goonan, I transformed from science nerd to lit geek.
It was during my final years at Georgia Tech that I began to think more critically about science fiction and its importance to my understanding of and thinking about the world. Thanks to a copy of the SFRA Review, the official publication of the Science Fiction Research Association, from Eugene Thacker, I joined the organization. Soon thereafter, I attended my first SFRA conference in the Summer of 2006 at White Plains, New York where I got to meet Norman Spinrad and Nalo Hopkinson, and I presented a condensed version of my undergraduate senior thesis on Asmovian robots, Cameron’s Terminator, and Cold War technologies.
After earning my B.S. in Science, Technology, and Culture from Georgia Tech, I began graduate school at the University of Liverpool in England. While in its intensive one year masters program, I earned my M.A. in Science Fiction Studies with guidance from Andy Sawyer and David Seed. My M.A. thesis was on Cold War American identities represented in the original and reinvented Battlestar Galactica television series. It was during my time at Liverpool that I began to write science fiction reviews for the SFRA Review. I won the 2007 Mary Kay Bray Award for best work in the Review for not one, but two of my reviews: a post-9/11 reading of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and a review of Ian McDonald’s Brasyl.
After leaving Liverpool, I started work on an English Literature Ph.D. from Kent State University where I am continuing to study today. Shortly after returning to the States, I became the first Publicity Director of the SFRA in 2008. I continued writing reviews for SFRA Review, and I expanded into other publications with The German Quarterly and Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. I have forthcoming works: an entry in Critical Companion to Science Fiction Film Adaptations on Chris Columbus’ movie Bicentennial Man and an essay on the early development of the modern tank in The Wellsian: The Journal of the H.G. Wells Society. Now, I am co-editing a book under contract with McFarland on science fiction and postcolonial studies tentatively titled The Postnational Fantasy: Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction with two of my colleagues: Masood A. Raja and Swaralipi Nandi.
I have completed my Ph.D. coursework, and I have taken my three comprehensive exams in Twentieth-Century American Literature (with Kevin Floyd), Postmodern Theory (with Tammy Clewell), and the works of Philip K. Dick (with Donald “Mack” Hassler). I am developing my dissertation prospectus now, and I hope to have my dissertation completed by next year.
Besides taking pleasure from science fiction in its many forms, I enjoy photography, building with Lego bricks, tinkering with computers, constructing antennas and other technologies, and writing on my blog, dynamicsubspace.net. I live in Kent, Ohio with my wife and our cat.
About dynamicsubspace.net
I began dynamicsubspace.net as a mac.com blog a few days after I landed in England and arrived in Liverpool in 2006 for two reasons: 1) I wanted to record my adventures in England for myself and my friends, and 2) I wanted to improve my writing and argumentation through regular practice. So, you will find a mixture of personal and professional; lighthearted and serious; World of Warcraft and politics; and Lego and science fiction. This blog has evolved over time, and I am sure that it will transform further as time passes and I, as its author, change as an individual, a professional, and a writer.
The single unifying thread that runs through all the blog posts on dynamicsubspace.net is that it is all an expression of myself or an extension of my interests. Some posts are personal reflections, other posts are critical reviews, and yet other posts are reminders or helpful messages for the science fiction community. You will many find posts related to the SFRA, because the organization and its members are very dear to me as friends and colleagues who helped guide me to where I am now.
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