Professor Jennifer Rea
November 13, 2014—A classics professor and a PhD candidate in English, both from southeastern U.S. universities, have been named as recipients of the second annual Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship. Professor Jennifer Rea is an associate professor of classics at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Andrew Ferguson is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia.
The fellowship is named for literary superstar Ursula K. Le Guin, whose appearance as keynote author at the Center for the Study of Women in Society’s 40th Anniversary Celebration in November 2013 inspired its development.
Andrew Ferguson
Sponsored equally by CSWS, Robert D. Clark Honors College, and the UO Libraries Special Collections and University Archives, the award supports travel for the purpose of research on, and work with, the papers of feminist science fiction authors housed in the Knight Library. Fellows are selected by a three-person committee consisting of representatives from each of the sponsoring bodies.
The University of Oregon is home to the most important archive of feminist science fiction authors in the country. The Knight Library houses the papers of authors Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm, Suzette Haden Elgin, Sally Miller Gearhart, Kate Elliot, Molly Gloss, Laurie Marks, and Jessica Salmonson along with Damon Knight, and is also in the process of acquiring the papers of James Tiptree, Jr. and other key feminist science fiction authors. For more about these collections, visit http://library.uoregon.edu/node/3524.
Professor Jennifer A. Rea’s first book, Legendary Rome (2007), explored the Roman poets’ reinvention of Rome’s legendary past for post-civil war Augustan Rome. Her latest project, Perpetua’s Journey, for Oxford University Press, presents a graphic history of Vibia Perpetua’s prison diary. Rea received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin. She looks forward to coming to the Knight Library to complete work on another current book project, Empire without End: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Vergil, which explores why Vergil’s violent foundation story remains relevant in modern science fiction and fantasy, and especially within the fantasy novel Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Andrew Ferguson is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia, working in 20th- and 21st-century literature, media studies, and critical discourses on gender, sexuality, and disability. His work has appeared in Textual Cultures, Hypermedia Joyce, and Science Fiction Studies, and his biography of R.A. Lafferty is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press Modern Masters of Science Fiction series.
Deadline for applications for the 2015-16 Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship is September 4, 2015.
