From the SFRA Executive Committee
SFRA Candidate Statements
Secretary Candidate Statements
Karoline Huber: I have been a member of the SFRA since the Dresden conference in 2023. Through this organization, I have met many new colleagues and friends, as well as my partner, and our conferences have shaped my research and professionalization in significant ways. This organization has come to play an important role in my life, personally and professionally, and I feel very invested in its future. This is why I would like to get involved with the institution in the role of secretary. As I still have three years of funding for my PhD, I am in a stable position in my career where I have the time to take on this role. Having been briefed on the nature of the work, I am confident that I can perform the required tasks. While this would be my first role in the SFRA, I possess related work experience. For many years during my studies, I was involved with the student council at my university, where I organized events and mediated between students, professors, and university administrators. I took this voluntary position very seriously, even the seemingly menial work it sometimes demanded. As those who have had occasion to work with me know, I am organized, adaptable, and respectful of timelines (organizational and otherwise; no time travel, I promise). Despite being a relatively recent member, I am—as evidenced by my active participation since joining—committed to making this organization my priority.
Brittany Roberts: I am running for the position of SFRA Secretary. I am currently Assistant Professor of English at Appalachian State University, where I teach classes in world literature and cinema, environmental humanities, animal studies, and world horror and science fiction. Science fiction is a significant component of my research and teaching interests, and since 2015, when I attended my first SFRA conference in Stony Brook, New York, SFRA has been one of my most important academic homes. As a regular attendee of speculative fiction conferences such as SFRA and ICFA and an SFRA member of ten years, I am deeply committed to giving back to the community that has indelibly shaped my own academic career.
I have extensive experiences with academic organizing, including with SFRA, that have well-prepared me to serve as SFRA Secretary. For example, from 2013 through 2015, I was a ranking member of my graduate program’s Graduate Student Association, where I served in a secretary-like position as primary meeting notetaker and graduate liaison to faculty. From 2013 through 2016, I served as co-editor of the graduate student-run Eaton Journal for Archival Research in Science Fiction, where I coordinated the journal’s news and announcements section, maintained the journal’s email account, and facilitated connections with science fiction archives around the world. In 2017, I served as co-organizer and graduate student liaison for the SFRA conference in Riverside, California, where I was completing my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with Designated Emphasis in Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies at UC Riverside. From 2016 through 2018, I was a member of the SFRA’s Mary Kay Bray Award committee, serving as committee chairperson in 2018. In my current position at Appalachian State University, I am a member of my department’s Community-Building and Literary Studies Committees, where I am responsible for deciding on curriculum for my university’s Literary Studies major and for coordinating with other departments and programs on campus to increase connections between academic units. Finally, I am also an active researcher in the field of science fiction, with six published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on speculative fiction, several encyclopedia entries and book reviews, and two speculative fiction-related monographs-in-progress. These experiences have thoroughly acquainted me with evolving trends in the field as well as with the organizational skills needed to successfully fulfill the position of SFRA Secretary.
If elected to the position, I am committed to continuing the excellent work of outgoing Secretary Sarah Lohmann and to maintaining the SFRA’s larger goals of diversifying core membership and creating accessible and dynamic spaces for the study of speculative fiction across career levels. Thank you for your time and consideration of my candidacy.
President Candidate Statements
Stina Attebery: I am standing as a candidate for the SFRA President. I have been involved with the SFRA since the 2011 conference in Lublin, Poland. Like many of us, the SFRA has always been an important academic home for me. The Lublin conference was the first time I had ever presented my academic work, and I was blown away by how welcoming and supportive everyone was. As I have moved from being a nervous grad student to an early career scholar, I am interested in paying forward the same support and mentorship that I’ve received over the years.
I have served on several SFRA award committees—the Student Paper Award Committee from 2016-2018 and the Thomas D. Clareson Award Committee from 2023-present. I have also served as the Division Head for Film and Television for our sister organization, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, which gave me a wealth of experience not only in conference organizing, but also the interpersonal skills needed to make sure a group of people can communicate and find solutions when navigating the challenges of organizing academic spaces during and after a global pandemic, and through periods of political uncertainty.
I will continue to support the work the Executive Committee has been doing to prioritize diversity and accessibility. We are an international community, and I feel that it’s important to balance the needs of our far flung membership by continuing to offer hybrid format options for our meetings and making sure our conference locations and award committees reflect the diversity of our current and future membership. I would also like to continue the conversation we started at the most recent annual membership meeting about the need for clear policies about AI use in conference presentations. I want to make sure that any guidance the EC offers to conference organizers reflects our shared commitment to ecological sustainability and labor rights, while also providing a clear model for newcomers who may be receiving contradictory and conflicting advice about AI use. We’ve always been a conference that’s a welcoming space for new grad students and early-career researchers to learn how to be scholars and navigating the ethics and practicalities of generative AI in academia seems like a logical extension of our commitment to this kind of support.
Thank you for considering me, and I look forward to giving back a community which has been so crucial for my intellectual life.
Alan N. Shapiro: As President of the SFRA, I would lead the international scholarly organization in a new and activist direction, engaging intellectually, culturally, and politically with the polycrisis unfolding in the world today. In my major work, Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction (Transcript Verlag and Columbia University Press, 2024), I argue that science fiction has become a formidable “reality”-shaping force. To confront the catastrophes of hyper-modernism, the scope of what science fiction studies investigates should expand beyond novels, films, and TV series to the advanced digital media technologies such as AI, VR, robots, and ubiquitous computing as they are designed and implemented within surveillance and algorithmic capitalism. And we must imagine creative, thoughtful, pragmatic utopian alternatives. My earlier book Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance was praised by editor-in-chief Istvan Csicsery-Ronay in Science Fiction Studies as the leading work of “science fiction theory.” My auto-socio-biography, Venice in Las Vegas, will be published this summer by Peter Lang Publishing House. I hold a Ph.D. in Artistic and Media Research from the University of Oldenburg. I have taught sociology at New York University, transdisciplinary design at Folkwang University of the Arts, future design research at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, and media theory and posthumanism at Bremen University of the Arts. My blog featuring hundreds of short essays is www.alan-shapiro.com. The radically transformative activism that I propose and plan would find embodiment in a series of very different kinds of conferences inspired by the tradition of William Forsythe’s choreography as an organizational practice, and assisted by practitioners such as Duke University dance professor Michael Klien and dramaturg Steve Valk. I have extensive and meaningful international experience. Having lived half my life in the United States and half in Europe, I am deeply familiar with the situations and challenges faced by scholars in literature and media studies in both contexts. In recent years, I have also had many Chinese and South Korean students. I am an active member of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science. I speak German, French, and Italian, and can read Spanish and Portuguese. As President, I would explore the possibilities of raising new funds for the organization from philanthropic sources. I would prioritize feminist, cyborg, queer, trans, Afrofuturist, and other minority perspectives in science fiction. I would focus on strengthening the protection of scholars, teachers, researchers, writers, and artists in the current neo-fascist repressive climate. We will defend and fight back against Trump and other authoritarians.
SFRA Review 