
It’s hard for me to believe that it’s only been 10 years since I started teaching at City Tech in Brooklyn. My gray hair seems like a testament to it being far longer.
I’ve been able to accomplish a lot of things since landing in Brooklyn as evidenced by my CV and Teaching Portfolio. I’ve had the joy of teaching great students, and I’ve enjoyed the collegiality and comradery of excellent coworkers.
Some of the greatest hits of things that I’ve done–some alongside the best colleagues and others by myself–include:
- Acquired, Shelved, and Built the Finding Aid for the City Tech Science Fiction Collection (with Alan Lovegreen, Wanett Clyde, Justin Vazquez-Poritz, Maura Smale, Morris Hounion, Laura Westengard, Lavelle Porter, Keith Muchowski, Anne Leonard, and Jessica Roman).
- Inaugurated the Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium (with Aaron Barlow, Jill Belli, Mary Nilles for the first, and Lucas Kwong, Lavelle Porter, Wanett Clyde, Sean Scanlan, Leigh Gold, Kel Karpinski, and Emily Hockaday on subsequent ones).
- Directed City Tech’s B.S. in Professional and Technical Writing Program.
- Won some grants with Patrick Corbett to fund projects to leverage LEGO in writing classes and communication workshops.
- Contributed as an NEH Faculty Fellow and co-developed four pedagogical modules for A Cultural History of Digital Technology: Postulating a Humanities Approach to STEM (directed by Anne Leonhardt and co-directed by Sandra Cheng, Satyanand Singh, and Peter Spellane).
- Co-edited with Sean Scanlan a special issue of New American Notes Online (NANO) on Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
- Published the OERs: Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook and ENG2420 Science Fiction Syllabus.
- Published book chapters on blindness in Science Fiction (in Sharon Packer’s Lenses on Blindness), posthumanism in Science Fiction (co-authored with Lisa Yaszek in the Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman), and using Twitter in the writing classroom (in Twenty Writing Assignments in Context).
- Talked with Neil de Grasse Tyson on his Startalk Radio Show on 30 May 2019.
- Shared my research on Neuroscience and SF, Generative AI and Teaching, and Skateboarding Culture online.
- Won the 2023 Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Literature, Media, and Communication in the Ivan Allen College at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
There’s a lot left to do. What can I accomplish in the next 10 years?