Student Paper Award
The Student Paper Award is presented to the outstanding scholarly essay read at the annual conference of the SFRA by a student.
[*Each award is keyed to the calendar year preceding the conference at which it was presented.]
Award Committee
Kathryn Heffner (chair)
Yilun Fan
Francis Gene-Rowe
2024
- Vicky Brewster (Swansea University), “Simulated Worlds and Digital Disruptions: Gothic Glitch in The Tenth Girl.”
2023
- Josie Holland (University of Richmond), “Constructing Radical Queer Futures and Deconstructing Noir Fiction in The Penumbra Podcast.”
2022
- John Landreville (Wayne State University) for his paper “‘Speculative Metabolism: Digesting the Human in Upstream Color.”
2021
No award was given due to the cancellation of the 2020 conference because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
2020
- Conrad Scott, “‘Changing Landscapes’: Ecocritical Dystopianism in Contemporary Indigenous SF Literature.”
- Honorable Mention: Erin Cheslow, “The Chow that Can Be Spoken Is Not the True Chow: Relationality and Estrangement in the Animal Gaze.”
2019
- Grant Dempsey, “Did they tell you I can Floak?’: Living Between Always and Sometimes, in China Miéville’s Embassytown.”
2018
- Josh Pearson, “New Weird Frankenworlds: Speaking and Laboring Worlds in Cisco’s Internet of Everything”
- Honorable Mention: Kylie Korsnack, “Towards a Time Travel Aesthetic: Writing-between-worlds in Okorafor, Butler, and Baledosingh”
2017
- Francis Gene-Rowe, “You Are The Hero: Stephen Mooney’s The Cursory Epic”
- Honorable Mention: Brittany Roberts, “ ‘The Present Doesn’t Exist’: Music, Animation, and the Rupture of Cultural Memory in Vladimir Tarasov’s The Passage”
2016
- Dagmar Van Engen, “The Interspecies Erotic: Sex and the Nonhuman in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy”
2015
- W. Andrew Shepherd, “‘What is and What Should Never Be’: Paracosmic Utopianism in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World“
2014
- Michael Jarvis, “‘Wherever you go, there you are’: Postmodern Pastiche and Oppositional Rhetoric in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension“
2013
- W. Andrew Shephard, “Beyond the Wide World’s End: Themes of Cosmopolitanism in Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination“
2012
- Florian Bast, “Fantastic Voices: Octavia Butler’s First-Person Narrators and ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night'”
2011
- Bradley Fest, “Tales of Archival Crisis: Stephenson’s Reimagining of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier”
2010
- Andrew Ferguson, “Such Delight in Bloody Slaughter: R. A. Lafferty and the Dismemberment of the Body Grotesque”
2009
- David Higgins, “The Imperial Unconscious: Samuel R. Delany’s The Fall of the Towers“
2007
- Joseph Brown, “Heinlein and the Cold War: Epistemology and Politics in The Puppet Masters and Double Star“
2006
- Linda Wight, “Magic, Art, Religion, Science: Blurring the Boundaries of Science and Science Fiction in Marge Piercy’s Cyborgian Narrative“
2005
- Rebecca Janicker, “New England Narratives: Space and Place in the Narratives of H. P. Lovecraft”
2004
- Melissa Colleen Stevenson, “Single Cyborg Seeking Same: The Post-Human and the Problem of Loneliness”
2003
- Sarah Canfield Fuller, “Speculating about Gendered Evolution: Bram Stoker’s White Worm and the Horror of Sexual Selection”
2002
- Wendy Pearson, “Homotopia, or What’s Behind a Prefix?”
2001
- Eric Drown and Sha LaBare (tie), Drown for “Riding the Cosmic Express in the Age of Mass Production: Independent Inventors as Pulp Heroes in American SF, 1926–1939,” and LaBare for “Outline for a Mode Manifesto: Science Fiction, Transhumanism, and Technoscience”
2000
- Sonja Fritzsche, “Out of the Western Box: Rethinking Popular Cultural Categories from the Perspective of East German Science Fiction”
1999
- Shelley Rodrigo Blanchard, “‘Resistance is Futile,’ We Are Already Assimilated: Cyborging, Cyborg Societies, Cyborgs, and The Matrix”
SFRA Review Editor
Ian Campbell
icampbell@gsu.edu
Web Director
David Shipko
dshipko1@jhu.edu
SFRA Review Editor
Ian Campbell
icampbell@gsu.edu