by Carma | Oct 11, 2017 | Awards
SFRA Grad Student Members: Remember to submit your conference presentation from last summer’s SFRA 2017 conference in Riverside for consideration for the Graduate Student Paper Award. It’s a great opportunity to have your work honored by your sf peers and to build lines for your CV.
In order to be eligible, all you have to do is send in the paper that you presented as you presented it (no revised or extended versions – other than light editing to correct typos). Please attach all presentations (either in Microsoft Word or PDF format) to an email with the subject line, “SFRA Grad Student Award Submission” and send them to (hugh.oconnell@umb.edu). The deadline for submission is Wednesday, November 15th.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the chair of the committee, Hugh O’Connell, directly at the above email.
The committee looks forward to reading your work.
by Carma | Oct 5, 2017 | News
Dear SFRA Members,
As promised, on October 4th, you will be sent a link to a ballot on the proposed revisions to the bylaws. As you may recall, the proposal is to create staggered terms for the executive committee, by ending the current Vice President and Treasurer’s terms one year early and thus having elections for those two offices in 2018, elections for President and Secretary in 2019, no elections in 2020 (because the then-current officers would be about to commence their second and third years in office), etc. See the full text of the proposal in the latest Review.
Voting will open on 4 October 2017 and will remain open until November 2.
If this change is approved, the following sections of the bylaws would read thus:
Article V, Section 1: The officers of the association shall be chosen by the membership. There shall be a president, a vice president, a secretary, and a treasurer. They shall take office on January 1 of the year succeeding their election. The terms of office shall be staggered, such that in any given year up to two officers may be newly elected to their positions.
Article VI, section 1: Elections shall be held for three-year terms. The president and secretary will be elected in 2019 (to serve from January 2020 through December 2022) and every three years thereafter. The vice president and treasurer will be elected in 2018 (to serve from January 2019 through December 2021) and every three years thereafter.
Article VI, section 3: In each year in which elections are required, the Executive Committee shall establish a time and date by which ballots for the election of officers must be received, which date shall be known as the election date.
Sincerely,
Jenni Halpin
SFRA Secretary
by Carma | Sep 25, 2017 | Events
Dear SFRA members,
Hello from the executive committee! As we discussed at the business meeting in Riverside in July, our original venue for SFRA 2018 fell through and we have been scrambling to find new accommodations for our upcoming annual meeting. We’re pleased to announce we now have a home for the SFRA 2018 conference, so mark your calendars: it will take place on the campus of Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, from Sunday, July 1, to Wednesday, July 4.
In keeping with Milwaukee’s long history as a site of labor activism and union struggle, including the famous Bay View Massacre of protestors striking for the eight-hour-workday and the longest Socialist mayoral tenure in US history — as well as ongoing and increasingly urgent global concerns about the rise of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and autonomous robots —the overarching theme of SFRA 2018 will be “The Future of Labor.” The conference will be co-organized locally by Gerry Canavan (Marquette University) and Pete Sands (University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee).
More details, including a formal call for papers and details on lodging and accommodations, will be forthcoming! Thank you for your patience.
Excitedly,
Keren Omry, Gerry Canavan, Jenni Halpin, and David Higgins
PS: Please publicize not only this news but the SFRA Support a New Scholar Program for advanced graduate students and non-tenure-track scholars! See the application form here.
The deadline is October 15, 2017.
by Carma | Jul 2, 2017 | Awards
SFRA Awards 2017!
The Science Fiction Research Association (www.sfra.org) is very pleased to announce the winners of this year’s SFRA awards, which were presented at the annual meeting of the organization, held this year in Riverside, CA, from June 28-July 1, 2017.
Student Paper Award, which recognizes the best student paper as presented at the previous year’s conference:
Francis Gene-Rowe, for “You Are The Hero: Stephen Mooney’s The Cursory Epic.”
Honorary Mention: Brittany Roberts, for “’The Present Doesn’t Exist’: Music, Animation, and the Rupture of Cultural Memory in Vladimir Tarasov’s The Passage.”
Mary Kay Bray Award, given for the best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in the SFRA Review in a given year:
A.P. Canavan, for his review of Netflix’s Daredevil and Jessica Jones
Pioneer Award, which recognizes the writer or writers of the best critical essay-length work of the year (2016):
Lindsay Thomas, for “Forms of Duration: Preparedness, the Mars Trilogy, and the Management of Climate Change,” American Literature 88.1 (March 2016)
Thomas D. Clareson Award, which recognizes outstanding service activities-promotion of SF teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations:
Pawel Frelik
Pilgrim Award, honoring lifetime contributions to science fiction and fantasy scholarship:
Tom Moylan
Also at the meeting, the University of California, Riverside presented its Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Program Book Award to Steven Shaviro for his Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016). Honorary mention went to Rebekah Sheldon for The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and Scott Selisker for Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Congratulations to all winners!
by Carma | May 11, 2017 | Awards
The Executive Board of the Science Fiction Research Association invites travel grant proposals to attend and present at the annual conference of the Science Fiction Research Association. Maximum awards of $300 for regional and $500 for international travel may be given. Applicants must be current SFRA members; all current SFRA members are eligible to apply. Grant checks will be presented to awardees during the conference funded by the grant.
See Conference Travel Grant for details. Deadline extended to 17 May.
