Kathryn Allan
Editor’s Note: Kathryn Allan sent this link from her blog from April 2016 to update her many readers on the progress of her Le Guin Fellowship research and writing: http://www.academiceditingcanada.ca/blog/item/319-le-guin-fellowship-update
2013 Le Guin Fellow: Kathryn Allan
2014 CSWS Annual Review Q&A with Kathryn Allan, plus her report
Selected as the first recipient of the Le Guin Fellowship in the fall of 2013, independent scholar Kathryn Allan described her selection as “the best honor I’ve had in my academic career by far.” As the editor of Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), the first book-length work investigating disability in science fiction, Allan enlarged the scope of her research through her Le Guin project, “‘The Other Lives’—Locating Dis/Ability in Utopian Feminist Science Fiction.” The fellowship, she reported, enabled her to spend ten full days researching the archived collections of Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Suzette Haden Elgin, and Sally Miller Gearhart. In commenting on her experience, Allan wrote: “Due to the depth and complexity of the material collected, the feminist SF archive holds a great deal of interest for scholars from a wide variety of disciplines. Linguists will find a treasure trove in Elgin’s archive: there are files full of her careful documentation of Láadan, the women’s language she created and included in her Native Tongue trilogy. Fan studies scholars will be particularly interested in exploring the many hundreds of fan letters (from adults and children alike) in Le Guin’s archive that span her entire writing career. Gearhart’s collection will appeal to anybody studying the gay and lesbian rights movement of the 1970s. Not only does her archive include personal correspondences detailing her motivation behind writing The Wanderground, there is a variety of material that documents how rights activists organized in a pre-Internet era. For anyone wanting to better understand the ferocity of the feminist SF classic, The Female Man, Russ’s archived letters are a biographer’s dream: full of sharp political commentary, critical literary analysis, intense self-reflection, and motivating lessons in how to be a Feminist.”
