A picture of some black leaves

IAFA Officers
2010—2011

Members of the Executive Board include five elected officers: President, First Vice-President, Second Vice-President, Treasurer, and Public Relations Coordinator. Other officers are appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the other elected officers. Organization and refereeing of academic paper sessions at ICFA is under the direction of Division Heads, also appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Board.

President

Jim Casey

High Point University

Jim Casey is an Assistant Professor at High Point University in North Carolina. He has an MA from the University of North Texas, an MPhil from the University of Glasgow, and a PhD from the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama, where he was the first Strode Exchange Scholar to study at The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. Although primarily a Shakespearean, he has published on such diverse topics as fantasy, early modern poetry, textual theory, performance theory, postmodern theory, comics, masculinity, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Battlestar Galactica.

First Vice-President

Sherryl Vint

Brock University

Sherryl Vint is Associate Professor of English at Brock University and Director of the Interdisciplinary MA in Popular Culture. She is the author of Bodies of Tomorrow and Animal Alterity, and co-editor of the The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction, and Beyond Cyberpunk. She is co-author of The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction and co-edits the journals Science Fiction Film and Television and Humanimalia.

Second Vice-President

Sydney Duncan

Frostburg State University

Sydney Duncan is an assistant professor of English at Frostburg State University. She is active in science fiction and fantasy scholarship and fandom. She has an M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Ph.D. from the University of Alabama.

Treasurer

William Clemente

Peru State College

Bill Clemente is a professor of English at Peru State College where he has taught a variety of courses for the past eighteen years, from Nonwestern Literature to the History of the English Language. Bill presently serves his second term as Treasurer for the IAFA. A fan of SF for fifty years, Bill experiments this spring 2010 with an on-line SF Literature and Film class. Bill enjoys bird watching and photography and serves as "unofficial official" photographer for a variety of organizations.

Public Information Officer

Crystal Black

Crystal Black has been in the tech industry for 10 years and is currently a marketing operations manager for JDSU's Test and Measurement group. Crystal has focused on driving domestic and international events, web site development and marketing, and social media marketing. Crystal has a Bachelor and a Masters Degree in English Literature from Virginia Tech.

Immediate Past President

Farah Mendlesohn

Middlesex University

Farah Mendlesohn is Reader in Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature in the Media Department at Middlesex University and writes on the history of American religions and American science fiction. In 2005 she won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book for The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, which she edited with Edward James. Her book Rhetorics of Fantasy won the BSFA award for best non-fiction book in 2009; the book was also nominated for both Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. In 2010 she was twice nominated for Hugo Awards in the Best Related Books category. She was the editor of Foundation - The International Review of Science Fiction from 2002 to 2007.

Membership & Registration Coordinator

Bridgid Shannon

Pine View School for the Gifted

Bridgid "Brie" Shannon has lived in 10 states, visited 48, and participated in long-term cultural exchanges in Germany and Ghana. She currently teaches at the Pine View School for the Gifted. She has a passion for reading, writing, and ideas fostered by personal, conference based, and academic study at the undergraduate and graduate level. Currently, she is finishing the M.A. in Children's and Young Adult Literature and the M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Hollins University.p>

Student Caucus Representative

Taryne Taylor

University of Iowa

Taryne Taylor is Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Iowa. She holds an M.A. in Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature from Florida Atlantic University. Her research focuses on feminist science fiction and fantasy, especially late nineteenth-century feminist utopias. Her other scholarly areas include Victorian literature, transnational feminist theory, and critical race studies.

Chief Technical Officer (Tech Gnome)

Mike Smith

High Point University

Michael Smith holds the BS in Computer Science, the MS in Management and the PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is currently an Associate Professor of Information Systems at High Point University where he teaches courses in management information systems and operations management. His research has appeared in journals including the Communications of the ACM, the Journal of MIS, The European Journal of Operations and Production Management, Database and Information & Management. He has been an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy since he bought a copy of Poul Anderson's The High Crusade at a department store in Atlanta in the summer of 1973.


Curtis Potterveld

Independent Scholar

Curtis Potterveld holds a BS in Physics and a MS in Astrophysics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a MS in Aerospace Engineering from Arizona State University. He works currently for Boeing Space Operations as a systems engineer on the Commercial Crew Transportation System. Curtis is also pursuing a PhD in systems engineering at Steven's Institute of Technology. Prior to working for Boeing he taught at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and worked at Microcosm Inc. He acquired is passion for engineering from reading and watching science fiction and fantasy as child and he has been hooked on it ever since.


Len Hatfield (Consultant)

Len is a former president of the IAFA. Besides the fantastic in literature, his interests include literary theory, postmodernism, and humanities computing.

Virginia Tech





Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Brian Attebery, Executive Editor

Brian Attebery is editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and Professor of English at Idaho State University. His dissertation in American Civilization at Brown University became his first book, The Fantasy in Tradition in American Literature. He has since published Strategies of Fantasy and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction and was co-editor, with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler, of The Norton Book of Science Fiction. He was a Fulbright lecturer at Uppsala University in 1988, and has been honored for his scholarship by Idaho State University, the Science Fiction Research Association, the Idaho Humanities Council, and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Stephen R. Donaldson, Contributing Editor

Committee Director

Gary K. Wolfe

Roosevelt University

Gary Wolfe has long been involved in literary scholarship and criticism, with a particular focus on the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In addition to having written several books on these topics, he's been a monthly book review columnist for LOCUS magazine since 1992. Over the years, Gary has contributed more than two hundred essays to academic journals, reference works, encyclopedias, and magazines. Among the more recent are essays on authors Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, Jane Yolen, Joanna Russ, and Ray Bradbury.

Conference Chairman

Donald E. Morse

University of Debrecen

Donald E. Morse is University Professor of American, Irish, and English literature, University of Debrecen, Hungary and Emeritus Professor of English and Rhetoric, Oakland University, Michigan. He has been twice Fulbright Professor (1987-1989, 1991-1993) and Soros Professor (1990, 1996-1997), University of Debrecen, Visiting Professor at the Centre for Transatlantic Studies, Maastricht and Partium University, Nagyvarad, Romania. He has written and/or edited 15 books. Among his latest are The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American (2003), The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock with Kalman Matolcsy (2011), Brian Friel's Dramatic Artistry (2006), and Anatomy of Science Fiction (2006). He is also co-author of Worlds Visible and Invisible (1994), the editor of The Delegated Intellect: Emersonian Essays on Literature, Art, and Science (1995) and The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts (1987). With the Hungarian scholar, Csilla Bertha, he co-edited A Small Nation's Contribution to the World (1993), More Real than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts (1991), and The Celebration of the Fantastic (1992), and published translations of contemporary Hungarian plays into English, Silenced Voices: Transylvanian-Hungarian Plays for which he received a Rockefeller Study Fellowship. Their translation of The Heretic received its World Premiere at ICFA. His more than one hundred scholarly essays have appeared in a English and American Studies. Since 1984 he has served as the Conference Chair of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (USA) and for the past 15 years has hosted Bloomsday in Detroit. The University of Debrecen awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in recognition of his international scholarship and his service to Hungarian higher education. In 2007 the Hungarian Society for the Study of English awarded him the Laszlo Orszagh Medal, the first non-Hungarian to receive the award.

Conference Publications Officer

Judy Collins McCormick

Campbellsville University

Judy Collins McCormick is Associate Professor of English at Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Kentucky. She has an M.A. from Florida Atlantic University and a Ph.D. in Modern American Literature from the University of Kentucky. She publishes little and hasn't been listed in the ICFA program as an official presenter since 1999, but she discovered the power of the all-nighter when she was still in high school, the first time her father, Conference Founder Robert A. Collins, asked her to please help him get the next issue of Fantasy Review to the printer. Since then, she has committed to memory everything her father would tell her about page lay-out, and she has had a passion for ICFA since its inception.

Book Exhibit and Sales

David Hartwell, Director

New York, NY

(from the Wikipedia) David Hartwell is an American editor of science fiction and fantasy. He has worked for Signet (1971-1973), Berkley Putnam (1973-1978), Pocket (where he founded the Timescape imprint, 1978-1983, and created the Pocket Books Star Trek publishing line), and Tor Books (where he spearheaded Tor's Canadian publishing initiative at CAN-CON in Ottawa, and was also influential in bringing many Australian writers to the US market, 1984-date), and has published numerous anthologies. Since 1995, his title at Tor/Forge Books has been "Senior Editor." He chairs the board of directors of the World Fantasy Convention and, with Gordon Van Gelder, is the administrator of the Philip K. Dick Award. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative medieval literature.

Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Director

Rick Wilber

University of South Florida

Rick Wilber is a journalism and mass-media professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He has published two novels, several short-story collections, a memoir, and several college textbooks on writing, editing and mass-media studies for some of the world's largest publishers. Rick has published more than fifty short stories and a similar number of poems in magazines and anthologies ranging from Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine and Asimov's Science Fiction magazine to the often reprinted Alien Sex anthology and many others. Most recently, he is the editor of "Future Media" (Tachyon, 2011), a collection of reprinted classic works of fiction and non-fiction.

Board Assistants and On-Site Coordinators
(appointed conference-to-conference)

Audio-Visual Support

Sean Nixon

University of Colorado

IAFA Division Heads

Fantasty Literature (FL)

The Fantasy Literature division welcomes papers on all aspects of fantasy literature (broadly defined to mean anything from genre fantasy to magic realism and folk tales) including, but not restricted to, criticism on works by fantasy authors writing in English, inter disciplinary approaches to the genre, and scholarship on fantasy theory.

Stefan Ekman, Lund University

Stefan Ekman has a PhD in English literature from Lund University in Sweden, with a thesis on the role of settings in fantasy. He also teaches the sf and fantasy module at the Creative Writing programme there. Since 1995, he has lectured on and taught fantasy literature, and spent eight years as fantasy specialist for a major publishing company. His research focuses on fantasy environments but occasionally slips into other areas of the fantastic.

Home page (in Swedish): http://www.ordskogen.com/stefan

Blog: http://mythotopes.wordpress.com

 

Horror (H)

The horror division focuses on genre. Papers may explore any aspect of horror literature including but not limited to The Gothic, Physical Horror, Psychological Horror, Archetypes, and the Supernatural. Discussion of the evolution and theory of Horror is also encouraged.

Rhonda Brock-Servais, Longwood

Rhonda Brock-Servais has been a member of IAFA since 1994. She has a PhD in English from the University of South Carolina (1999). Her major fields of study are The Gothic and Children's Literature. She also has an interest Contemporary Horror, particularly the works of Peter Straub. She has been at Longwood University since 2001 and currently serves as department chair.

 

International Fantastic (IF)

The International Fantastic division invites papers on all aspects of the international fantastic in all media. In this context "international" means either non-anglophone or originating in a culture considered/considering itself as foreign within the anglophone world; this may include minority literatures within an anglophone country. Comparative projects also welcome.

Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Iowa State University

Rachel Haywood Ferreira is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Iowa State University. She has worked with sf in a variety of media, from novels and short stories to comics, magazines and fanzines, and some film. Her articles have appeared in Science Fiction Studies, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Hispania, and Extrapolation, and her book, The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction, is forthcoming in 2011 with Wesleyan University Press.

 

 

Science Fiction Literature (SF)

The Science Fiction Literature Division accepts proposals for papers on topics related to science fiction novels, short stories, and poems, and on critical theory related to the SF genre. This division's emphasis is textual; papers considering science fiction in film, television, or comics should apply to the Film & Media or the Visual & Performing Arts divisions instead.

David M Higgins, Indiana University

David Higgins is a Visiting Lecturer in English at Indiana University with a combined PhD in English and American Studies. His research examines imperial imaginings in twentieth-century literature and culture with an emphasis on science fiction, and his dissertation interrogates "New Wave" SF to expose transformations in imperial discourse that occur during the Vietnam War and the climax of European decolonization. David has published in Science Fiction Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television, and SFRA Review.

Visual & Performing Arts (VPA)

The Visual & Performing Arts Division turns a speculative eye towards issues of representation in visual media, both new and traditional. It draws its subject matter from a diverse range of texts including: video games; comic books & sequential art; performance studies and liveness as embodied in drama, dance, and music; plastic arts such as sculpture, painting, photography, and architecture; the full range of body art; and digital imagery.

Stefan Hall, Defiance College

Stefan Hall is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Defiance College. His research interests include film, video games, and comic books as well as speculative, pulp, and weird fiction.

 

 

 

Participatory and Convergence Studies (PCS)

The Participatory and Convergence Studies (PCS) Division accepts papers on all aspects of fan culture, production, and communities; transformative works (both fan works and professional works); audience/reception studies; and convergence (multi-media, often interactive/participatory) narratives and "texts". This would include (but not be limited to) topics such as geek culture; fan fiction; fan art/film; vidding; conventions/convention culture; cosplay; marketing the fantastic; online fan communities, websites, forums, and mailing lists; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (and similar transformative works); alternate reality games/books/comics/tie-in products; and viral marketing.

Barbara Lucas, Lakeland Community College

Barbara Lucas holds an MA from Case Western Reserve University. Her work has appeared in Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy: An Encyclopedia and Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association; the Fantasy, Futuristic, and Paranormal Chapter of the Romance Writers of America (where she serves on the Board and as the editor of the Out of This World newsletter); and the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

 

Film and Television (FTV)

The Fantastic in Film & Media division welcomes proposals for paper presentations that deal with the fantastic broadly construed in cinema and television.

Jeffrey Weinstock, Central Michigan University

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock earned his doctorate from George Washington University's interdisciplinary Program in the Human Sciences and is currently professor of American literature and culture at Central Michigan University, where he is also coordinator of the graduate programs in English. He is the author of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Wallflower Press), Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (Fordham University Press), Vampires: Undead Cinema (forthcoming, Wallflower), and Charles Brockden Brown's Four Gothics: A Polemical Introduction (forthcoming, University of Wales Press). In addition to editing four volumes of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft for Barnes & Noble, he has edited academic volumes on M. Night Shyamalan (Palgrave), Rocky Horror (Palgrave), South Park (SUNY), The Blair Witch Project (with Sarah Higley, NYU), Edgar Allan Poe (with Tony Magistrale, MLA), and spectrality in American life (Wisconsin). His work has appeared in journals including American Literature, Pedagogy, The Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, JFA, and ATQ. He is currently the general editor for the Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, is editing the MLA approaches to teaching Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (with Carla Mulford) and developing a new book project on contemporary monstrosity called Invisible Monsters.

 

Children's & Young Adult Literature & Art (CYA)

The Children's and Young Adult Literature and Art division accepts critical scholarship papers that focus on literature aimed at younger readers. This includes picture books as well as middle-grade and young adult novels, short stories, and graphic novels that involve fantasy, horror, paranormal romance, science fiction, and any other aspect of the fantastic.

Amie Rose Rotruck, Hollins University

Amie Rose Rotruck holds an MA and MFA in Children's Literature from Hollins University, as well as a self-designed BA in Writing for Children from the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of "Bronze Dragon Codex" (as R.D. Henham) and "Young Wizards Handbook: How to Trap a Zombie, Track a Vampire, and Other Hands-On Activities for Monster Hunters".

This position is open and accepting applications through May 1. If you're interested in taking on the work of IF Division Head, please contact both Sherryl Vint, 1st Vice President (sherryl.vint AT gmail.com), and Amie Rose Rotruck outgoing CYA Division Head (arotruck AT gmail.com), with a cover letter about your interest in and qualifications for the job. Applications for the position should include a CV. The IAFA board of directors will consider all applications for the position.

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