The Gunn Center for the Study of SF

The 2022-2023 academic year was an exciting one for the Gunn Center for the Study of SF (CSSF)!

Prof. Giselle Anatol served in her first full year as Director, unexpectedly juggling a last-minute assignment as the interim director of KU’s Hall Center for the Humanities. Luckily, she was assisted at the Gunn Center by an enthusiastic staff of graduate students who made sure that CSSF programming ran smoothly.

Anthony Boynton, who is writing his dissertation on ghosts and haunting in African American literature, served as the Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) in the Fall semester; Sandra Jacobo, who is starting her dissertation on embodiment and gender in African Caribbean women’s speculative fiction, served as the GRA in the Spring term.

Madeleine Bonnallie, an MA student with interests in Gothic literature and horror, coordinated our social media presence, started documenting items in the Gunn Center’s physical space, and began working on a digital database to make CSSF holdings more accessible to SF writers, researchers, and enthusiasts around the world. She was joined in this task by MA student Michael Johnson, who hopes to use place and space metadata from the Center’s periodicals collection for his master’s thesis. Bonnallie and Johnson were supported in the database project by a grant and technical collaboration from KU’s Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities (IDRH). Because Anatol’s position at the Hall Center will last one more year, Prof. Katie Conrad has graciously offered to serve as the Gunn Center’s interim director for 2023-2024.

The CSSF Virtual Book Club, an online event that has drawn an international, interdisciplinary group of participants, continued to meet at lunchtime on the last Friday of each month. This year’s selections included Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, in anticipation of the author’s campus visit in Spring 2024; Mongrels, a werewolf coming-of-age story by Stephen Graham Jones; a musically-inspired novella entitled The Deep, by Rivers Solomon; and two works for young people: Pet by Akwaeke Emezi and the Newbery Prize-winning novel The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera. The CSSF staff is looking forward to the next round of lively and thought-provoking conversations; if you’re interested in joining us, please check the website for the 2023-2024 reading list and Zoom registration link! (https://sfcenter.ku.edu/book-club)

As the kick-off event of 2022-2023 year, the book club engaged in a discussion of 3 of the top 10 finalists for the 2022 Theodore A. Sturgeon Memorial Award: “The Dark Ride” by John Kessel, “Bots of the Lost Ark” by Suzanne Palmer, and “Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story” by Nalo Hopkinson.

Participants were the first to learn (and sworn to secrecy!) that Hopkinson’s short story had been selected by the jury as the winner of the annual prize. Hopkinson was unable to join us in person at the Sturgeon Award Ceremony, but her virtual reading and Q&A were an inspiring cornerstone event at the first annual Sturgeon Symposium—2 days of interdisciplinary programming from a diverse range of scholars, artists, and speakers.

The theme for the 2022 symposium was Celebrating Speculative Communities, and included in-person and online research panels, roundtable discussions on “The Current State of SF” and “Teaching SF in the Current Age,” and creative presentations by Indigenous and Native Hawaiian writers. (Videos available at https://sfcenter.ku.edu/sturgeon-symposium.)

This Spring, the Center also welcomed a visit from world-renowned scholar and specialist in science ficton Prof. Simon Bréan (U. of Paris-Sorbonne) as the Hall Center for the Humanities 2023 International Scholar.

Planning for the 2023 symposium is well underway, once again highlighting the wealth of incredible work being done in the speculative arts, here at KU and across the globe. The 10 Sturgeon Award finalists for the 2023 prize have just been announced:

• Samantha Mills’ “Rabbit Test”

• Maria Dong’s “In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird”

• Dominque Dickey’s “Slow Communication”

• A.T. Greenblatt’s “If We Make It Through This Alive”

• Nicasio Andres Reed’s “Babang Luksa”

• Derrick Boden’s “Ten Steps for Effective Mold Removal”

• Innocent Chizaram Ilo’s “The City and the Thing Beneath It”

• Annalee Newitz’s “A Hole in the Light”

• A.D. Sui’s “Toronto Isn’t Real and Other Metropolitan Anomalies”

• Yoon Ha Lee’s “Bonsai Starships” ting our prose and poetry! Additionally, I’ve been leading the effort to get LandLocked, the graduate literary and arts magazine based out of the English Department, back on its feet, and I serve on the departmental Creative Writing Committee. I speak for all Creative Writing graduate students when I say we’re excited for Silvia Park to join the KU writing community!”

And in light of the selection of Octavia E. Butler’s groundbreaking novel, The Parable of the Sower, as the 2023-2024 KU Common Book, the organizing committee has decided on a theme of Fantastic Worlds, Fraught Futures. We welcome you to join us from September 20 - 22, 2023 for this stimulating event! More information can be found online at https://sfcenter.ku.edu/sturgeon-symposium.

And if you are in town next spring, make sure to get your tickets early for the April 2024 campus visit of 3X-Hugo Award winner N.K. Jemisin, who will serve as the 2023-2024 KU Common Book speaker. The Gunn Center is thrilled about the prospect of having undergrads, grad students, staff, and faculty across KU engaged in a reading experience centered on a work of science fiction, and equally as excited about the chance to engage with one of the top SF writers of our age!

Please visit our website regularly for frequently updated information about our history, affiliated faculty, course offerings, award opportunities, the book club, and other upcoming events (https://sfcenter.ku.edu/), and email us at sfcenter@ku.edu with any questions.

Ever onward!

Rhetoric and Composition: Emily Counsil (she/they) (2nd year Rhetoric and Composition graduate student) “As I’m entering my second year of graduate school, I’m grateful for the opportunities and experiences from my first year. I presented at two conferences on the importance of digital testimony. This connects to my broader interests of digital/social media, feminism, and queerness. I’ve been enjoying being a part of SAGE’s Professional Development Committee and hosting write-ins for the graduate students. I’m looking forward to serving on the Events and Fundraising Committee this coming year.”

Literature and Literary Theory: Jade Harrison (4th year Literature PhD Candidate): “The 2022-2023 AY was a very productive and generative year. During Fall 2022, I received the opportunity to travel to Sheffield, England and present my research on text analysis and language in 20th century African American women’s fiction at the Digital Humanities Congress on behalf of the History of Black Writing (HBW) and their work with the HathiTrust Research Center. In Spring 2023, I was awarded a GRAship with the History of Black Writing (HBW) as a Data Curation and Visualization Coordinator for its ongoing work with an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project called The Black Literature Network. Additionally, I received the Sharistanian GRAship to support my dissertation writing and research during Spring 2024. I also presented my work “An Exploratory Analysis of Language in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” at the College Language Association Convention (CLA) in April, where I was also able to talk with prospective students interested in pursuing or continuing their graduate studies with KU English on behalf of the department’s DEI Committee.”

We hope that SAGE will continue to evolve to best support graduate students’ needs, and to prepare them for futures in graduate school and beyond.