2026-2027 (Track B)
Support a New Scholar Awardee:
Orin Posner
Brief Bio
Orin Posner is a postdoctoral fellow (2025–2026) in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa. Her research focuses on urban space, architecture, maintenance, and infrastructure in science fiction. She received her PhD from Tel Aviv University and is currently developing her dissertation into a book manuscript, provisionally titled The Architectural Novum in Science Fiction Literature: Narrating New Urban Forms. Her work has appeared in Science Fiction Studies (2025) and Frontiers of Narrative Studies (2020), and is forthcoming in Studies in the Fantastic (2026) and JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory (2026). She has also contributed to the collection American Science Fiction Television and Space (2023, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-edited the collection New Forms of Space and Spatiality in Science Fiction (2019, Cambridge Scholars).
Research Summary
Orin’s research examines how science fiction imagines built environments and how extreme technological, environmental, and social changes redefine space and time. Her current book project develops a narratological account of speculative urban space, showing how specific architectural innovations – including vertical cities, layered cities, and flooded cities – influence characters’ spatial and temporal perceptions, mobility, and habits. Alongside this work, her new project focuses on portrayals of maintenance and infrastructure in speculative fiction, examining how the mundane and often-overlooked practices of care and repair become central in times of crisis and within conditions of risk.