People

Current Directors and Allies

Angela YT Chan is an independent researcher, curator and artist specialising in climate change. Her work examines power in relation to the inequity of climate change, through self-archiving, rethinking geographies and speculative fiction. Her recent research-art commissions span climate framings, water scarcity and conflict, and has held residencies with Arts Catalyst, FACT/Jerwood Arts’ Digital Fellowship and Sonic Acts. Angela has produced curatorial projects and workshops as Worm: art + ecology (2014–2021), and continues to collaborate with artists, activists and youth groups under her own name. She co-directs the London Science Fiction Research Community, co-founded the London Chinese Science Fiction Group and is a visiting lecturer at art schools. Angela is also a research consultant, having worked in international climate and cultural policy (UNCOP26) and on climate and sustainability projects for major cultural institutions. Tweets: @angelaytchan  Website: angelaytchan.com.

Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé is a Lecturer in Digital Media Practice with the University of Southampton. Her book Gothic Remixed (Bloomsbury 2020) examines remix culture through the lens of monster studies, and her co-edited collection Embodying Contagion (UWP/Open Access 2021) explores how fantastical metaphors of contagion have infiltrated the way news media, policymakers, and the general public view the real world and the people within it. Megen is an editor of the Genealogy of the Posthuman, an Open Access initiative curated by the Critical Posthumanism Network, and is also the lead on the Creative Posthumanism project. Read more about Megen’s work on her blog: frankenfiction.com. Tweets: @MegenJM.

Dr Nora Castle is an IAS Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK. She recently completed her PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies, entitled, “Food Futures: Food, Foodways, and Environmental Crisis in Contemporary Science Fiction,” which explored the future of food in/as science fiction. Situated at the interstices of science fiction studies, food studies, and the environmental humanities, her project focused on meat, plants, kitchens, and farms as thematic streams in recent sf, particularly in the shadow of climate change and environmental catastrophe. Nora’s research interests include food futures, critical animal studies, critical plant studies, critical infrastructure studies, and the future city. Her recent publications include “In Vitro Meat and Science Fiction: Contemporary Narratives of Cultured Flesh” (Extrapolation, 2022 [Open Access]), a co-edited Special Issue on “Food Futures” (2022) in Science Fiction Studies, and a co-edited volume on Animals and Science Fiction (Palgrave 2023). She is currently planning a post-doctoral project on infrastructural futures and science fiction, which will focus on distribution systems and supply chains in American sf from the 1950s to present. 

Cristina Diamant is a PhD candidate at Babeș-Bolyai University and a former visiting scholar at the Centre for Gender, Sexuality, and Writing at the University of Kent. Her thesis investigates the tension between radicalism and assimilation in a transnational framework, acknowledging the uneven and combined development of feminism. Her research interests include death studies, media studies, pop culture, and posthuman studies, especially in the context of investigating various representations of otherness. A former assistant editor of the Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory and a former member of the editorial committee for Forward, the all-Ireland publication of the Connolly Youth Movement, she is currently a contributor for the medical humanities journal Synapsis, as well as editor of the cultural magazine Echinox at her home university. Tweets: @MsCrisDiamant.

Francis Gene-Rowe is a Teaching Fellow in Global Media Management at University of Southampton, Councillor of the British Science Fiction Association and SFRA UK representative. Areas of research/practice include critical play, gamification, experimental writing & publishing, ecocriticism, alternative futurisms, speculative poetry & poetics, queer fictions, critical utopia & dystopia, necropolitics, nostalgia & solastalgia, Philip K. Dick, William Blake, Ursula K. Le Guin, Walter Benjamin and goblin futures. Francis is co-editor (with Stephen Mooney and Richard Parker) of Corroding the Now: Poetry and Science|SF (Veer Books & Crater Press, 2023) and (with Michael Fuchs and Stefan Rabitsch) the “Beyond Petromodernity” special section of Extrapolation 64:1 (2023), and also served as a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2023. https://linktr.ee/francisgenerowe

Rachel Hill is an AHRC: LAHP funded PhD student in the Science and Technology Studies department of University College London where she researches the environmental histories of spaceflight. She is a co-director of the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC) and a member of the feminist research collective Beyond Gender. She is a co-convener of both the Centre for Outer Space Studies (COSS) and the Transplanetary Ecologies reading group at UCL.

Yen Ooi is a writer-editor-researcher whose works explore East and Southeast Asian culture, identity and values. Her projects aim to cultivate cultural engagement in our modern, technology-driven lives. She is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London looking at the development of Chinese science fiction by diaspora writers and writers from Chinese-speaking nations. Yen is narrative director and writer on Road to Guangdong, a narrative-style driving game. She is author of Rén: The Ancient Chinese Art of Finding Peace and Fulfilment (non-fiction), Sun: Queens of Earth (novel) and A Suspicious Collection of Short Stories and Poetry (collection). She is also co-editor of Ab Terra, Brain Mill Press’s science fiction imprint. When she’s not got her head in a book, she lectures, mentors and plays the viola. www.yenooi.com

Former Directors and Allies

Please note that some of these bios may be out of date. If at any point you would like us to update your bio, please let us know.

Avery Delany is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths University. Their thesis examines how ideas of “what it means to be human” come to be co-constructed, negotiated and reconceptualised by single-player science fiction video games, video game players and developers. Their research specifically focuses on human/AI relations, the construction of desirable/undesirable bodies, and imaginings of the future/futures. Avery’s research interests include decolonisation and decentering, disabled anthropology, human/non-human relations, video games, experimental methodologies, and anthropologies of the future. Avery is a member of the Beyond Gender collective. Their work has been featured on POMEmag, Sidequest, and in a forthcoming special issue of Teaching Anthropology. You can find Avery on Twitter @redrocketpanda and via their website fieldnotesofthefuture.com.

Dr Ibtisam Ahmed is a doctoral research student at the University of Nottingham’s School of Politics and IR. His thesis, titled ‘The Decolonial Killjoy: the British Raj as a space of political utopia’, challenges the portrayal of colonialism as a form of the good life and instead highlights anti-colonial responses as grassroots utopias. His work focuses on marginalised voices and includes an analysis of literature, theatre, art and popular media as forms of decolonial protest. He is also heavily involved with QTIPOC activism and has been a long-time campaigner for the decriminalisation of queer identity in Bangladesh (his home country) and the Commonwealth. His research profile and publications can be found at www.nottingham.ac.uk/politics/people/Ibtisam.Ahmed and he tweets @Ibzor.

Dr Mia Chen Ma recently defended her thesis at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests lie primarily in the increasing role of science fiction as a critique of ecological conundrums. By looking into recent eco-oriented Chinese science fiction works, her analysis associates ecological narratives closely with the complexity of China’s changing socio-political discourse over the past two decades. She considers that the central question posed, and often left unresolved, by eco-oriented Chinese SF is how to resist the universal narratives of centrality and exceptionalism regarding specific types of society—whether they be human, more-than-human, dystopian, utopian, socialist or capitalist.

Rhodri Davies is a doctoral candidate at Birkbeck, University of London, and co-founder and Co-Director of the London Science Fiction Research Community. His research focuses on Science Fiction-based New Religious Movements in post-war America and he was recently awarded an R.D. Mullen Fellowship to undertake archival research at the Eaton Collection at UC Riverdale.

Dr Tom Dillon is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. Tom’s work attempts to contextualise the British ‘New Wave’ in science fiction within the wider cultural and political landscape of the 1960s. Tom has written for Science Fiction Studies, Fantastica, and (with Linda Stupart) Studies in Arts and Humanities.

Dr Guangzhao Lyu is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at University College London. His doctoral research centres on two recent SF movements, namely the British SF Boom and the Chinese SF New Wave – both emerging in the 1990s and still dynamic nowadays. Through setting up such an equivalence, Guangzhao attempts to investigate how the two ‘booms’ interact with the dramatic social and cultural transformation brought forward by the neoliberal reforms of Mrs. Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping and how they are connected in a globalised context. Apart from LSFRC, Guangzhao is also a co-founder of ‘London Chinese SF Reading Group’ and runs monthly seminars on various Chinese sf stories. Summaries of these seminars can be found on WeChat official account ‘sfinlondon’.

Dr Sasha Myerson is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on urban space and the built environment in 1990s feminist Cyberpunk science-fiction. Examining posthuman and multiple subjectivities, her work explores how such individuals navigate, survive and resist within technologized cities of surveillance and discipline. Her research interests include Utopian and resistance studies; history of consciousness; psychiatry and anti-psychiatry; postmodernism; gender; de-colonial thought and experimental music. Aside from her academic work, Sasha writes fiction and poetry. Sasha is also a freelance social-media writer and copy-editor, having worked with clients in several fields including medicine and AI technology. You can find her on Twitter @Gear_774.

Dr Aren Roukema is a SSHRC doctoral fellow based at Birkbeck, University of London, currently completing a PhD dissertation on the cultural-historical interplay of nineteenth-century occultism and science fiction. This research is part of a wider interest in intersections between literature and esoteric expressions of science and religion. Aren is Editor of Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Recent publications include Esotericism and Narrative: The Occult Fiction of Charles Williams (Brill, 2018) and “Naturalists in Ghost Land: Victorian Occultism and Science Fiction,” in The Occult Imagination in Britain: 1875-1947 (Routledge, 2018).

Dr Katie Stone is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis explores childhood and utopianism as imagined in science fiction. It seeks to put mainstream science fiction into conversation with feminist, queer and decolonial critical and creative work in order to interrogate the genre’s complicity with various structures of oppression. Katie is co-founder of the research network ‘Utopian Acts’ whose work will be featured in a forthcoming special issue of Studies in Arts and Humanities Journal which she and Raphael Kabo have edited. Katie has written for Foundation, Fantastika and SFRA Review and she is one of the founding members of the research collective ‘Beyond Gender’. She is on Twitter @cyborg_feminist and @UtopianActs.

Dr Josie Taylor is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages, Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research explores animal studies and petrocultures, focusing on a range of science fictionsworks and their exploration of commodity production/extraction and energy futures. She has organised conferences on Deleuze and Guattari Studies, European Philosophy, and Precarity in Academia. Previously, she was the organiser of a women in philosophy reading group. More recently, she has become a member of the Beyond Gender Collective. She has a forthcoming publication on the legacy of the zombie and petroculture in the works of Reza Negarestani and China Mieville, and an article on Indigenous resistance published with Dovetail Publications. She also enjoys performing her research in creative ways, and has done performance pieces on oil culture and feminism with the A-Z collective.

Sing Yun Lee is an illustrator, artist and graphic designer specialising in the field of Science Fiction studies, now primarily working under the studio name Sinjin Li. She has been Head of Design for the London Science Fiction Research Community since 2017, and previously was the principle Design Editor for Fantastika Journal. Other publications and conferences she has produced work for include the 2018 Petrocultures: Transitions conference hosted by Glasgow University, Correspondences (Journal for the Studies of Esotericism), and Crater Press. Her work for LSFRC’s 2018 conference ‘Sublime Cognition: Science Fiction and Metaphysics’ was shortlisted for a BSFA Award.  She can be found on Instagram @sinjin_li.

Dr Sinéad Murphy is a postdoctoral research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, as part of the Temporal Communities project; she also works at the Middle East Centre in the London School of Economics. She completed her AHRC London Arts and Humanities Partnership-funded PhD in Comparative Literature in 2019. She is an assistant editor at Fantastika Journal, and a member of the interdisciplinary UK-based research collective Beyond Gender. Her work has been published in Science Fiction StudiesStrange HorizonsThe Literary Encyclopedia, and the Postcolonial Studies Association Newsletter. Her primary areas of research are modern and contemporary Middle Eastern literature, speculative fiction, theories of world literature, and postcolonial theory.

Dr Tasnim Qutait is a postdoctoral researcher at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her interests are in postcolonial literature, speculative fiction and translation studies. She is currently completing a book on the politics of nostalgia in Anglophone Arab writing and putting together a project on literary worlds and the reimagining of security. 

Dr Jo Lindsay Walton is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sussex Humanities Lab, working on speculative fiction and political economy. He also co-edits Vector, the critical journal of the BSFA, with Polina Levontin. Web: https://www.jolindsaywalton.com/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jolwalton.

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