New MA in SF and Film Studies

Abstract

528 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) The SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship (originally the Pilgrim Award), was created in 1970. Its original name echoed the title of J.O. Bailey's Pilgrims through Space and Time (1947) and was altered in 2019. This year’s awardee is Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside). The SFRA Innovative Research Award (formerly the Pioneer Award) is given to the writer or writers of the best critical essay-length work of the year. This year’s winner is Susan Ang for “Triangulating the Dyad: Seen (Orciny) Unseen,” which appeared in Foundation 48.132. Raino Isto received an honorable mention for “‘I Will Speak in Their Own Language’: Yugoslav Socialist Monuments and Science Fiction,” from Extrapolation 60.3. The Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service acknowledges outstanding service activities, including promotion of sf teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations. This year’s awardee is Wu Yan of Beijing Normal University. The Mary Kay Bray Award is given for the best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in the SFRA Review in a given year. This year’s awardees are Erin Horáková and Rich Horton for their essays “Treknomics” and “Gene Wolfe,” respectively, both from issue #327. The Student Paper Award is presented to the outstanding scholarly essay read at the annual conference of the SFRA by a student. This year’s awardee is Conrad Scott for “‘Changing Landscapes’: Ecocritical Dystopianism in Contemporary Indigenous SF Literature.” Erin Cheslow received an honorable mention for her paper “The Chow that Can Be Spoken Is Not the True Chow: Relationality and Estrangement in the Animal Gaze.” The SFRA Book Award is given to the author of the best first scholarly monograph in SF in each calendar year. The first winner of this new award is Xiao Liu of McGill University for her Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). The Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize, awarded by the SF and Technoculture Studies program at University of California, Riverside, honors an outstanding scholarlymonographthat explores the intersections among popular culture (particularly sf), and the discourses and cultures of technoscience, recognizing groundbreaking contributions to the field. Although not an SFRA prize, it is typically announced at the annual SFRA banquet. This year’s awardees are Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, both at the University of Southern California, for their Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (Fordham University Press, 2019). The judges also commended as particularly strong Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019) and Xiao Liu’s Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).—Gerry Canavan, English Department, Marquette University New MA in SF and Film Studies. If you are a film buff and the coronavirus pandemic has given you time to reevaluate your life and career, you might want 529 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE to consider doing a Master’s degree at Richmond, where the American International University in London is located, in 2021. Their exciting new MA in Film, Science Fiction, and Fantasy will launch in January 2021 and will also be available from September next year. This is the only graduate-level film program of its kind in the UK, combining sf and fantasy with film, television, and visual media, in which graduates receive both a UK and US qualification. The program is based near London, a top cultural and film-production capital, and combines theory and practice; students will learn the history and theory of film as well as production and digital storytelling. There will be the option of a research project or a practical project. If you have any questions, do contact the Richmond team at .—Ceri Schooling, PR and Communications Team, International American University Post-Utopia in Speculative Fiction: The End of the Future? Announcing a Special Issue of Humanities. Until the current pandemic, it was widely believed that we had entered a period of paralysis in the collective historical imagination. This paralysis was reflected in the inability to imagine a future radically different from the present, which was the prerequisite...