Masters’ School Seminar (14 April at 3 p.m.)

The next Masters’ School Seminar will be held on April 14 (Masters’ School schedule), and will be hosted by prof. Alexis Lothian, Director of Graduate Studies in the Harriet Tubman Department Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, who will give a talk Queer World-building and the History of the Future based on some of the ideas she develops in her book Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility (2018).

We invite you to read a short note by Alexis Lothian, which provides an interesting introduction to the lecture:

Alexis Lothian is an interdisciplinary scholar of queer and feminist media and cultural studies. Originally from Scotland, she studied at the University of Edinburgh and University of Sussex in the UK before moving to the US to pursue her PhD at the University of Southern California. She is now Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Harriet Tubman Department Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park (located in the Washington DC area), where she is also affiliate faculty in American Studies and Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities.

Her research centers on speculative fiction, digital media, and online fandom and their relationships to gender, race, and disability justice. Her first book, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility, was published in 2018 by NYU Press. The book explores alternative futures dreamed up by feminists, queers, and people of color in 20th- and 21st-century Britain and America––from feminist utopians to video remixers. As part of this work, she creates video remixes of her own, including “This is a Low: Old Futures in the Age of Brexit,” published in Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational in 2019. She is currently working on two book projects: a co-authored book on slash fan fiction with Kristina Busse, and a monograph on the formation of critical and social justice-oriented fan cultures in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Lothian has published extensively on the interconnections between feminist and queer knowledge production and media fans’ creative practices, including articles in American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Camera Obscura. A long-time participant in the feminist science fiction fan community, she chairs the Motherboard of the Otherwise Award, which recognizes speculative fiction that explores and expands understandings of gender. She also co-edits Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology (currently on COVID-19 hiatus) and was a founding member of the #transformDH collective and the editorial team for Transformative Works and Cultures