January 19, 2017—Two U.S. scholars from opposite coasts were selected as recipients of the fourth annual Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship, funded by the Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS) at the University of Oregon and the UO Libraries Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA). Theodora Goss is a senior lecturer in the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program and a lecturer in the Stonecoast MFA Program. Roxanne Samer is a postdoctoral scholar and teaching fellow in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.
Theodora Goss
Theodora Goss’s book publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; the book-length novella The Thorn and the Blossom; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia. She is the editor of Interfictions, a short story anthology, and Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology. Goss won the World Fantasy Award in 2008 and has been nominated for a number of literary awards. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Boston University and JD from Harvard Law School. Her academic writing focuses on late nineteenth-century anthropology, fantasy, and the monstrous. The fellowship will support her visit to the University of Oregon to carry out research for writing the Ursula K. Le Guin volume of the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series published by the University of Illinois Press.
Roxanne Samer
Roxanne Samer holds a PhD in Critical Studies from the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Samer coedited with William Whittington the book Spectatorship: Shifting Theories of Gender, Sexuality, and Media, which is under contract with the University of Texas Press. She is also the editor of “Transgender Media,” a special issue of Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism 37.2 (Fall 2017). She will visit UO Libraries’ SCUA to do research toward fleshing out her dissertation, “Receiving Feminisms: Media Cultures and Lesbian Potentiality in the 1970s”, for publication as a book.
The fellowship is named for literary superstar Ursula K. Le Guin and her husband, historian Charles Le Guin. It was Ursula Le Guin’s appearance as keynote author at the Center for the Study of Women in Society’s 40th Anniversary Celebration in November 2013 that inspired the development of this fellowship.
Sponsored equally by CSWS and SCUA, the fellowship supports travel for the purpose of research on, and work with, the papers of feminist science fiction authors housed in the Knight Library. These short-term research fellowships are open to undergraduates, master’s and doctoral students, postdoctoral scholars, college and university faculty at every rank, and independent scholars working in feminist science fiction. SCUA 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, Jessica Salmonson, and most recently, James Tiptree, Jr. For more about these collections, visit http://library.uoregon.edu/node/3524. Fellows are selected by a committee consisting of representatives from each of the sponsoring bodies.
