Keynote at the London Science Fiction Research Community (Birkbeck)

I've been asked to participate as a keynote speaker for the London Science Fiction Research Community's (LSFRC) inaugural annual symposium on the 16th September 2017. The event will take place at Room B04, 43 Gordon Square (Birkbeck University), and the theme for this first year is 'Organic Systems: Environments, Bodies and Cultures in Science Fiction.'

The theme speaks to my research interests in the Environmental Humanities and Human-Animal Studies. As director of the Science Fiction Research Association's (SFRA) conference last year in 2016, I chose to organise that conference around the theme of 'Systems and Knowledge' to draw attention to how systems thinking, themes and ideas permeate the mode.

I'm extremely honored to have been asked to participate in an event that looks as exciting at this one, and I'm especially looking forward to the roundtable with Gwyneth Jones, Paul McAuley and Adam Roberts.

This symposium is organised by Francis Gene-Rowe (PhD, Royal Holloway, University of London), Rhodri Davies (PhD, Birkbeck, University of London) and Aren Roukema (PhD, Birkbeck, University of London), who also run a monthly reading group held on the first Mondays of each month. The symposium grew out of the theme for the 2017 series of meetups, some of which I have been able to join.

Click here to see the event poster.

Click here to see the cfp. The deadline for proposals to present at the symposium is on the 31st May 2017.