The winners of the fourth annual R.D. Mullen Research Fellowship have been announced. The R.D. Mullen Research Fellowship is funded by SF Studies in the name of their late founding editor to support archival research in the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Literature at UC-Riverside. The committee—chaired by Rob Latham and consisting of Jane Donawerth, Joan Gordon, Roger Luckhurst, and John Rieder—reviewed a number of excellent applications and settled on a slate of three winners for 2011-12:
- ANDREW FERGUSON is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Virginia. His dissertation examines the aesthetics of “glitching” in modernist and postmodernist fiction, videogames, and sf. He received the award for best student paper delivered at the 2009 SFRA conference and the 2012 top prize from the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia for his work collecting the print materials of R.A. Lafferty. His work has appeared in SFS, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and other venues. He will spend ten days in the Eaton researching the “Shaver Mysteries” promoted in Amazing Stories during the mid-to-late 1940s.
- MATTHEW HOLTMEIER is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews. His research, on “biopolitical production and cinematic subjectivity,” uses fan culture studies to examine the dynamics of affect and belief in popular film and television audiences. His essays have appeared in Short Film Studies, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. He will spend a week in the Eaton studying the emergence of fan communities surrounding The X-Files, including working in the Mari Ruíz-Torres Collection of books, scripts, posters, photographs, and fan club materials relating to the program.
- MALISA KURTZ is a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brock University. Her dissertation examines the intersections of (post)colonialism, technoculture, and race in twentieth-century sf. She has presented her work at the Popular Culture Association of Canada conference and the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and has won a number of competitive research fellowships. During a month in the Eaton, she plans to explore “the cultural construction of a pan-Asian identity” in early pulp sf.