Research

My research expertise is in 20^th/21^st-century American Literature, Science Fiction, digital culture, and neuroscientific discourses in popular culture. I have broadened these interests through pedagogical research, application, and publications to include Rhetoric and Composition, Writing Studies, and Technical Communication.

I believe that research and writing should be inspired by relevance, fueled by intellectual curiosity, presented with rigor, evaluated with evenhandedness, and disseminated in the open using a combination of traditional and new media publishing technologies. I imagine a future where the expansive marketplace of ideas validates findings instead of a small number of editorial and peer-review gatekeepers. Vetting should not undercut the potential equal significance between a well-researched journal article and an equally well-researched, long-form YouTube video essay.

I invest my time and energy in an array of intellectual work that encompasses long-form endeavors, such as peer-reviewed essays, book chapters, and review essays, and short-form contributions, such as non-fiction reviews, popular essays, and blogging. Sharing my work with public speaking is also important to me, which I have done through conference and symposium presentations, workshops, and online video lectures.

Review writing is particularly important to how I see my role as a researcher. In these short form interventions, I comment on the work in question, connect it to the larger conversations it explicitly and implicitly invokes, and raise further questions about the work and its relationship to discursive trends. While some certainly devalue review writing in the humanities, I argue that it provides a vigorous and stimulating dialog within the field. It is for this reason that I have written twenty-nine thus far. And it was for two separate reviews in the SFRA Review that the Science Fiction Research Association awarded me the 2008 Mary Kay Bray Award for Best Writing.

Creating opportunities for research is also crucial. One such opportunity is making space in print, in person, and online for the sharing and debating of ideas. This is critically important to the marketplace of ideas. I acknowledge that I would have been unable to share my work with as wide an audience as I have without the support of colleagues, editors, and organizers. Recognizing their support for my work, I firmly believe in the importance of fostering and supporting the research of others. I have sought to do this through co-editing a collection of scholarly essays, co-editing a special journal issue, organizing the programming schedule of an international conference, and founding an annual symposium on Science Fiction at my college. Another opportunity for research is administrating special collections of archival holdings. At City Tech, I helped bring a turn-key collection of 600-linear feet of science fiction magazines, novels, collections, and scholarship, which is now called the City Tech Science Fiction Collection. In addition to collaborating with librarian colleagues who oversee it, I support scholars and instructors who visit the collection to use in their work or the work of their students. In these ways, I foster research communities around ideas and collections that help others with their research and inspire my own.

You can read my research categorized posts on dynamicsubspace.net here, and you can find some public-facing research resources that I’ve built to share out resources that I have found useful in my research: Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Pedagogy Bibliography and Resource List, Neuroscience and Science Fiction Bibliography, and Skateboarding Studies Bibliography.