I would like to announce the winners of the sixth annual R.D. Mullen Research Fellowships, which are funded by the journal Science Fiction Studies in the name of our late founding editor to support archival research in the Eaton Collection at UC Riverside. The committee—chaired by me 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 2014-15:
· JAMES MACHIN is a PhD student in Arts and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. His dissertation offers a cultural history of “weird fiction,” with a focus on its “Golden Age” of 1880-1940. He has had articles published in The Victorian and East-West Cultural Passage and has a review forthcoming in the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. While at the Eaton, he will explore the legacy of nineteenth-century decadence in Weird Tales magazine and will also examine the recently acquired archive of William Hope Hodgson’s papers.
· STEVEN MOLLMANN is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. His dissertation examines scientists in Victorian literature and the way that thinking like a scientist is represented as a visual practice. He has had articles published in English Literature in Transition and Gaskell Journal and has presented his work at numerous conferences. His time in the Eaton will be spent reading rare future-war stories from the turn of the twentieth century, investigating the ways in which science and scientists were mobilized in fictional scenarios of large-scale conflict and revolution.
· HANNAH MUELLER is a PhD student in German Studies at Cornell University, where she is pursuing Minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Film Studies. She has had chapters published in books on gender in Sherlock Holmes stories and on nudity in “quality television” series and has also done extensive translation work. While at the Eaton, she will examine materials relevant to her ongoing study of “transformative media fandom,” with particular attention to the influence of media fans on the representation of female and sexual minority characters in popular culture.
I am very grateful to my committee for their work in vetting the applications, and my congratulations to the three winners.—Rob Latham, UC Riverside