Critical Conversations is a faculty research series organized by both the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures and the UBC English Graduate Student Caucus. The events aim to foster interdisciplinary dialogue across fields and periodization between students, faculty, and the larger university community. These events, which occur a handful of times over the course of the academic year, feature brief talks by speakers on a critical topic informed by their wide-ranging research expertise and interests.
“Lineages of Speculative Fiction” is the second talk in this year’s Critical Conversations series. In this installment, Dr. Sandra Tomc, Dr. Siân Echard, and Dr. Aren Roukema will discuss genres and literary moments that have informed the varied developments of speculative fiction.
The in-person venue, Buchanan Tower Room 323, is wheelchair accessible. This event series is also available virtually via Zoom. Please indicate your attendance preference via the RSVP form linked below.
Light refreshments will be made available for in-person attendees.
Speakers
Sandra Tomc
Sandra Tomc (she/her/hers) is a filmmaker and scholar of nineteenth-century US literature and print culture. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century book and magazine history, romantic authorship, the gothic, especially Edgar Allan Poe, transatlantic fashion, and visual culture. Her most recent book, Fashion Nation: Picturing the United States in the Long Nineteenth Century (2021), looks at the role of clothing and décor in the development of nationalist visual itineraries in the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. Her scholarly work has appeared in ELH, American Literature, The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, and Representations. Her most recent documentary feature films include Citizen Marc (2013) and Cool Daddy (2019). She is also the author of Industry and the Creative Mind: The Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790-1860 (2012).
Siân Echard
Siân Echard (she/her/hers) completed her graduate work at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 1990, and has been at UBC since then. She is a medievalist and a book historian. Her interests include twelfth-century Anglo-Latin literature, particularly Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie; Arthurian literature; the works of John Gower; and the post-medieval reception and transmission of medieval texts. Her books include Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011); A Companion to Gower (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004); and Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). With Robert Rouse, she is also the general editor of The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
She has just completed a co-written history of the book in Britain, and she is working on a study of facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, from the early modern period to the present. She is endlessly fascinated by how the preservation and presentation of text—on the page, in the archive, in the digital world—affects how that text is received and discussed.
Aren Roukema
Aren Roukema (he/him/his) received his MA from University of Amsterdam and his PhD from Birkbeck, University of London. He is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC. He works at the intersections of popular culture, mental science, and heterodox religion in the Anglosphere. His publications include Esotericism and Narrative: The Occult Fiction of Charles Williams (Brill, 2018) and recent articles in Science Fiction Studies and the Journal of Literature and Science.
