Following Our Mission, Improving SFRA.org with 101 Feature Articles

There is an exciting new addition to sfra.org beginning today! As part of the organization’s mission “to encourage and assist scholarship” and “improve classroom teaching,” the SFRA is adding the 101 Features from the SFRA Review directly to our website. As you may know, the 101 Features are instant immersion articles that introduce readers to the major arguments and concepts within a field of study. These articles are useful to scholars, graduate students, and survey course students alike, because they briefly present a thorough overview of a given topic. Some of the 101 Feature topics include: Postmodernism, Comic
Studies, Mundane SF, Slipstream, New Weird, Science Studies, and Fan Studies. Adding the 101 Features to sfra.org as a public resource will help circulate this important scholarship in an open and easily accessible way, which will get 101 Feature authors more attention while increasing the visibility of the work of the SFRA. This will better enable public discovery and searching of these materials, and allow members to directly link to the 101 Features rather than pointing to the original SFRA Review PDF (you may have read Neil’s email earlier today about Ritch Calvin in an Orion Magazine article about literary SF–Ritch won the 2009 Mary Kay Bray Award for his Mundane SF 101 article). Karen Hellekson initiated this new plan by donating her recent “Scholarly Research and Writing 101” article from
SFRA Review #292, which is now available on our website at <http://www.sfra.org/node/101>. Michael Klein is in the process of requesting permissions from other 101 Feature authors to include their work on sfra.org. If you are a member of the SFRA and would like to contribute a new 101 Feature to the SFRA Review <http://www.sfra.org/review>, please contact the editors with your proposal.