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”
Overview
The Executive Committee 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 $500 may be given. (In the past the SFRA has considered distance traveled primarily in terms of domestic vs. international travel. Starting with travel awards for the 2019 conference, the geographic criterion has been based on the estimated cost of travel, as one factor among many.)
While you do not need to be a current member of the organization to apply for this grant, please remember that you must be a member of SFRA to present at the conference. Grant checks will be presented to awardees during the conference funded by the grant.
Deadline for this year's grants: March 31st (notifications of awards will be sent around April 30th)
Please organize your proposal as follows:
- A cover page that gives the name of the applicant (please do not identify yourself or your institution in the rest of the proposal), mailing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, distance from the conference; please note your willingness to accept partial funding. Submit your cover page as a separate document from the remainder of your proposal.
- The abstract for your paper (as submitted to the conference director).
- A grant proposal of no more than 300 words in which you explain:
- the financial difficulty you face in attempting to attend the annual SFRA conference and
- the professional growth you intend to receive by attending the conference.
- A realistic, detailed budget for your conference attendance. Be sure to list alternative funding resources you have already applied for and/or received money from.
Criteria for Selection
You may find the following criteria useful in preparing your proposal. The Executive Committee will use these to conduct reviews of all proposals.
- Need: The proposal demonstrates a significant need.
- Distance: The proposal demonstrates that the applicant will have to travel far distances to attend the conference.
- Contribution: The project being presented makes an original contribution to scholarship in the field.
- Professional Growth: The proposal articulates clear objectives for professional growth.
- Cost: Budget expenditures are reasonable and the applicant has also sought funding elsewhere.
- Dollars Available: The organization will attempt to award as many travel grants as possible while remaining fiscally responsible.
Restrictions
No individual or organization may submit more than one proposal for SFRA funding per calendar year (conference travel, research travel, or other grants); this does not prohibit an individual applying for conference travel funding from preparing a small grant application on behalf of a collective to which he or she belongs. The first consideration will go to those who have not received an award in the last three years.
Expectations of Award Recipients
Grant recipients will be expected to do the following:
- Present at the SFRA Conference they are being funded to attend.
- Submit a final written report of 1 to 2 pages to the secretary of the SFRA Executive Committee by September 30 of the calendar year in which they attend and present at the SFRA conference.
Questions should be directed to SFRA Secretary Sarah Lohmann.
Proposals should be submitted to the same, as Rich Text File or Portable Document Format attachments.