From the President

From the Vice President

From the SFRA Executive Committee

From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

The burgeoning excitement for our annual summer conference, evidenced by greater numbers of paper and panel proposals received for last year’s vibrant gathering in Oslo, and now for the upcoming Dresden 2023 meeting (including those submitted by in-person attendees of the latter), invigorates again the pressing question of how to expand science-fiction studies past our default Western and Global North circuits, to encompass speculative-fiction production and reception in other parts of the world.

From suggestions by members of our SFRA country representatives group, by our general membership, and by global CoFutures colleagues in Norway, we on the Executive Council have expanded these representatives to include SFRA members from China (Regina Kanyu Wang), Ireland (Thomas Connolly, pulling double duty as webmaster), Portugal (Tânia Cerqueira and Manuel José Sousa Oliveira), the Philippines (Gabriela Lee, also our At-Large Executive Committee member), in addition to adding reps of our Australia group (Yimin Xu).

Welcome representatives! If you’ve suggestions for more dedicated SFRA folk who can meet virtually 3-4 times a year; share what’s going on with sf production in their own regions, nations, or languages (such as conferences, publications, events, and trends); and advise the EC on ideas for the international future of the organization among other matters, please contact Hugh O’Connell, myself, or other members of the EC.

Here’s our current list of country reps: https://sfra.org/country-representatives/

At the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts a few months ago in March, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts BIPOC Caucus held sessions on exploring global methodologies and theories for speculative genre and media. Inspired by the annual theme that underscored contributions from Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism to our evolving discourse on fantastic and speculative arts, as well as by cross discussions that have been arising in Indigenous Futurism and Latinx Futurism, the Caucus has been trying to reach beyond the standard Suvinian and Todorovian conceptualizations of our family of non-real and semi-real genres. Researchers Suparno Banerjee, Nicola Hunt, Taryne Taylor, Candice Thornton, and Guest Scholar Isiah Lavender III discussed topics such as postcolonial and Indigenous terminologies, translation challenges, diversity of regional production, and continuity of spirituality in transnational diaspora.

This August, we expect that both the Executive Committee’s sponsored sessions will follow these worldwide sf themes. They are: two professional-development panels for early-career scholars, including one made up of international postdocs and graduate students looking for work in the global job market; and one diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging session themed to decolonial and Indigenous Futurist speculative methodologies and related research protocols. Additionally, panel proposals accepted include one similar to the ICFA global theories/methods discussion, put together by German cultural studies scholar Sonja Fritzsche and her colleagues from Peter Lang Publishing’s World Science Fiction Series (on which board I happen to belong).

What is world science fiction? Hoping you can share your mindful, enriching responses this summer with us at TU Dresden, “disrupting” conventional imagination.

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 2

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Hugh O’Connell

As I look out my office window here in Boston and notice the trees starting to bud, my mind turns to two things: the end of the Spring semester and the annual SFRA conference. This year, as part of our efforts to increase the SFRA’s international representation, we’re partnering with der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (the German Association for Research in the Fantastic, or GfF) for the joint Disruptive Imaginations Conference.

After attending the virtual 2021 conference hosted by Graham J. Murphy and Seneca College and missing out entirely on the 2022 conference hosted by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and the CoFutures collective due to contracting Covid-19, I’m very much looking forward to attending the Disruptive Futures conference in-person, while also taking part in the virtual programming. The organizers have received a stunning number of proposals from an international pool of applicants, and we’re quite optimistic that the conference will continue the ongoing work of globally expanding the SFRA by bringing this internationally diverse array of scholars into conversation with one another.

By now, everyone who sent a proposal should have heard back from the selection committee, but if for some reason you are still waiting, please contact the conference organizers, Julia Gatermann and Moritz Ingwersen at disruptive.imaginations@tu-dresden.de. And for those attending the conference in-person, as you begin to make your travel plans, make sure to check out the resources that the organizers are providing at the dedicated conference website: https://disruptiveimaginations.com. Here, you can find information in both English and German about accommodations, getting around Dresden, and some of the special events that are being planned for both in-person and virtual conference attendees, with more information to be added as we get closer to the start of the conference. And speaking of planning, we’ll be contacting the recipients of the SFRA’s travel grants in the first week of May.

Looking ahead, we’re scheduling another European conference in Estonia in 2024, before heading back to the United States for 2025 and 2026. The SFRA depends on volunteer conference organizers; so, if you would like to see the conference come to your area, please consider putting in a bid to host the conference (the SFRA is currently taking proposals for 2027 and beyond). You can contact me directly, and I’ll be happy to discuss what hosting the conference entails and how to go about putting a proposal together. Even if you are only curious at this stage, please feel free to reach out!

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 4

From the President

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From the President

Hugh O’Connell

It’s hard to believe that I’m writing my first SFRA President’s column. I attended my first SFRA conference in 2015 at Stony Brook. It alternately seems like yesterday and a lifetime ago. It was a career-changing experience; the people I met there became mentors, collaborators, and friends, and I finally understood what others meant when they talked about their “academic communities.” Over the last couple of years, the SFRA’s executive board have been making changes both large and small to make sure that this sort of experience is the norm for all our members. I’m looking forward to serving as President and continuing this work with them.

Speaking of service, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to our outgoing E-Board members: Sean Guynes, Keren Omry, and Gerry Canavan. Along with serving as Secretary from 2020-2022, Sean was editor of the SFRA Review from 2018-21 and helped institute many of its innovative transformations. Keren has served in a great number of roles, most recently as Immediate Past President, providing institutional memory, continuity, and advise to the Executive Board, and before that as President, and before that cycling through just about every award committee. Seriously, many, many thanks, Keren! Finally, I want to acknowledge our outgoing President, Gerry Canavan, who had the unenviable task of steering the SFRA through one of its most tumultuous periods: dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, cancelled conferences, and the move to online and hybrid conferences, alongside all the other usual tasks. Before he escapes entirely, he’ll be serving as the Immediate Past President for the next three years (just when he thought he was out… we pull him back in!).

Keeping the ball rolling, I’d like to thank our continuing E-Board members, Ida Yoshinaga (VP), Tim Murphy (Treasurer), Thomas Connolly (Webmaster), and Aisha Matthews (Conference Committee), as well as welcome our incoming members, Sarah Lohmann (Secretary), and our first ever At-Large members, Helane Androne and Gabriela Alejandra Lee. And for those out there who would like to get more involved with the SFRA and add their names to this illustrious list of volunteers, watch out for a forthcoming call for the new Outreach officer position.

Looking ahead, we’re all very excited for the upcoming “Disrupted Imaginations” joint SFRA and German Association for Research in the Fantastic (GfF) conference in Dresden, Germany (August 15-19, 2023). The CFP is currently circulating and can be found on the SFRA website. This is a great opportunity for the SFRA to continue building upon its international outreach efforts and to forge greater ties with the GfF. As a reminder, SFRA members are eligible to apply for travel grants of up to $500.

Finally, we know that there have been a couple of issues with the new website. We are working on getting these resolved, and we thank you for your patience as we continue down the WordPress rabbit hole. In the meantime, if you encounter any problems, please continue to reach out to us.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 4

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan

It’s hard to believe this is my final President’s Note! As challenging and chaotic as the last three years have been in some ways, they also seem to have passed by in the blink of an eye. I look back on what we have accomplished, including two successful annual meetings with previously unprecedented virtual formats and the first major revision of the organization’s bylaws in many years, with gratitude and pride, and I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the (mostly) smooth running of this organization over my term as president of SFRA, especially the elected members of the two executive committees I’ve worked with (Keren, Sonja, Ida, Sean, Hugh, Jess, and Tim) and the organizers of the recent and upcoming annual conferences (De Witt, Rebekah, Graham, Bodhi, Moritz, Julia, and Jaak), as well as everyone who has taken on extra work to serve on a policy or awards committee. I really look forward to supporting the group in my new role as Immediate Past President, and trust that you’ll be hearing from me again when it comes time for populating election slates and committees next year.

Keren Omry recently sent out the candidate statements for the next election, which will take place in mid-December. You can find those at the SFRA website, or elsewhere in this issue. As a reminder, here is what the new bylaws say about elections:

The immediate past president, in consultation with the Executive Committee, shall submit a slate of candidates for each position to be filled at least 60 days prior to the election day. These candidates will be nominated by current members (self-nominations and nomination by current members of the Executive Committee will be allowed). The immediate past president shall notify the membership in the SFRA Review, and all other appropriate and available electronic and social outlets, of this slate of candidates. Within 30 days of the publication of this slate of candidates in the SFRA Review, additional candidates may be nominated by submission of a petition signed by at least five persons of the membership in good standing entitled to vote in the election to the secretary of the association. At the end of this 30-day period nominations shall be closed and the ballot shall be prepared.

We have crossed that 60-day threshold and are fast approaching the 30-day threshold, after which the ballot will be closed; if you would like to supplement this slate of candidates with a new name, please, do so soon!

As always, reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns, or if you would like me to promote anything on SFRA’s social media. Thanks so much for entrusting me with the responsibility of leading this group for a time, and I look forward to seeing you all in Dresden next year.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan

We now are getting dangerously close to my last note as president of SFRA! It has been my genuine honor to serve this organization in this way and I look forward to staying on in the role of immediate past president for the next three years. I really want to encourage anyone who is interested in taking on an enlarged service role in the group to respond to Keren Omry’s recent calls for candidates for election this fall (including the next secretary and the president, as well as the two new “at-large” positions) as well as a US-based candidate for the outreach and publicity officer. And if you have experience with grants and/or with investment, we would love to talk to you about the development office position; please reach out! Also note Ida Yoshinaga’s recent call for the “Support a New Scholar” grant—and, if you’re eligible, consider applying! If you have any questions about any of these opportunities, please, reach out.

Last month’s conference in Oslo was a true highlight of my time as president; I want to thank Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and the CoFutures collective for putting on a simply incredible event that I know people will be talking about for a long time. As discussed at the business meeting on the last day of the conference, the next two conferences for our group will be Dresden 2023 and Estonia 2024; I’m glad to say we have secured US sites for 2025 and 2026 and will publicly announce those as soon as we’ve worked out all the details. If you’re interested in hosting SFRA in 2027 or beyond, reach out! It’s truly never too early to start thinking about this.

As always, if you have an event you’d like SFRA to distribute through its media lists, or any other idea or concern about the work the organization is doing, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at gerry.canavan@marquette.edu. I’d love to hear from you. These are hard times, and getting harder, but, as I said in my little speech at the awards banquet, the people in this organization lift me up, and bring me hope.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 2

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan

I could not be more excited by the Oslo conference—Bodhi Chattopadhyay and the CoFUTURES group have planned a simply incredible event (including an ambitious hybrid structure, half a dozen keynotes, nearly 200 presenters from six continents, and no conference fee!) that I really think will put our organization on the map in a new way. The conference registration page is now live at https://sfra.org/sfra-2022-conference/sfra-2022-conference-registration/ for both presenters and non-presenting attendees so I would ask you to sign up and let me know if you have any issues or concerns. (Presenters must be members of SFRA, so be sure to renew your membership as well.)

Thank you to Bodhi and to CoFUTURES for everything you’ve done and are doing for SFRA.

We are moving forward with our plans to expand the executive committee. We have issued recent calls for the outreach director and the web director and will name those new officers soon; we are also reaching out to people we believe might make a good development officer and seeing if they have interest and capacity to take this on. Aisha Matthews has generously agreed to chair the new conference committee, and will be working with the organizers of recent conferences, as well as the 2023 and 2024 conferences, to set policy and guidelines for future SFRA conferences; she will also help us select a site for 2025 and beyond. (Thank you Aisha!) Perhaps most importantly, our elections this fall will include votes for president and secretary under the new guidelines, and will also include one-year pilot terms for the new “at-large” exec seats; this one-year pilot will help ensure that procedures and expectations are clear in time for the scheduled at-large election (for the full three-year term) in 2023.

This fall’s election will of course also mark the end of my time as SFRA President and my assumption of the “Immediate Past President” role. I look forward to assisting the new exec in that new position, but I’ll look back very fondly on my time as SFRA president (despite all the COVID-related chaos that dominated the last three years). Thank you all for the trust you’ve placed in me these last three years, and thank you for all the work you all do to keep SFRA humming. See you in Oslo!

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan

This is the start of my last year as president, a term which has corresponded with an incredibly tumultuous time for the globe, much less our organization. Moving on will be bittersweet, but I’m very happy about what we’ve accomplished (especially under these circumstances!) and I’m looking forward to the coming year with a lot of optimism, especially at conference in Oslo, which is shaping up to be a simply incredible, totally unique event in the history of our organization, in all the best ways.

Over the coming months we will be populating some of the new positions we added in the last bylaw revision, so please watch out for more information on that front very soon.

I wanted to formally welcome Ida Yoshinaga and Jess FitzPatrick to their new roles as vice president and treasurer and thank Sonja Fritzsche and Hugh O’Connell one more time for all the hard work they put in the last three years. I also wanted to thank Carma Spence for the heroic work she has put in (and continues to put in) migrating the SFRA website to its new home. As always, if there’s something I can promote on social media, or some other way I can put the SFRA to work for you, please, reach out! I hope to see many of you in Orlando, and the rest in Oslo.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 51, no. 4

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan
Marquette University

Thanks so much to everyone who participated in the elections, and thanks to Ida Yoshinaga and Jessica FitzPatrick for taking on new leadership roles on the executive! Thanks also to everyone who worked on and voted to support the new bylaws, which will take effect over the course of the next year and allow the organization to evolve in ways that I believe will be to the benefit of us all (including the election of new “at large” members to the executive board and the establishment of a standing conference committee). Thanks also to Sonja Fritzsche and Hugh O’Connell, who will be rotating off the executive at the end of the year; your work has been so important and vital in these very challenging years for the organization and I want you to know how grateful I am to both of you for stepping up as you have on behalf of the group.

I hope by now you’ve seen the teaser for SFRA 2022, which will be headed up by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay of the University of Oslo in collaboration with the CoFutures research group and the “Theory from the Margins” project. (If you haven’t seen it, it’s here: https://twitter.com/co_futures/status/1446007301148659713). The full CFP will be out soon. I could not be more excited about this opportunity for SFRA; the Theory from the Margins group has a staggering global reach and can put our collective in conversation with people we haven’t begun to dialogue with yet. We will have to bring our A games to Oslo.

A quick technical note: Membership renewals will be turned off the SFRA site beginning Monday, November 1 in prepared for our migration off Wild Apricot to a new host. More on this as it develops!

As always, please reach out to me or to Sonja Fritzsche with any calls for papers, conference announcements, special issues of journals, and more that you’d like us to promote; I’m very happy to put work from SFRA members in front of as many eyes as we can manage. I can be contacted at gerry.canavan@marquette.edu or via the @SFRANews Twitter. Stay safe and I hope you have a terrific end to the semester, and I look forward to when we can all meet again in person soon.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 51, no. 3

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan
Marquette University

Thank you, thank you, thank you for a successful and stimulating SFRA21! It was an amazing conference, technical snafus and all, and it made me tremendously grateful to be a part of this community. People attending the business meeting and the banquet have heard my thanks already, possibly twice, but I wanted to extend one more round of appreciation to Graham Murphy for organizing such a terrific event; to Keren Omry for working such magic with the schedule; to everyone on the executive committee who pitched in in so many ways; to Carma Spence for her help with the website and design work; to the three amazing keynotes for their stellar presentations; to Aisha Matthews for her generous help both public-facing and behind-the scenes; to Lisa Yaszek, De Witt Kilgore, Isiah Lavender, and Taryne Taylor for the bracing and honest bias and belonging roundtable; to the panelists on the and to Ida Yoshinaga, Ali Sperling, and Bernie Mendoza for the terrific job workshop. I also wanted to extend some personal thanks to Lisa Yaszek, Isiah Lavender, Ida Yoshinaga, Sonja Fritszsche, Taryne Taylor, Sherryl Vint, and Bodhi Chattopadhyay, among others, for their counsel and good advice.

One of the things we’ve learned from this strange year is that some of the structures that govern SFRA are no longer working as well as we’d like them to, especially with regard to representation of its many different stakeholder groups. Following up on our robust conversation at the business meeting, we are exploring some possible changes to the composition of the executive committee that we hope to speak with the membership more about soon. Some of these changes will be customary; others of them would potentially require a vote of the membership to alter the bylaws. But we will have a robust comment period before we do anything; we certainly want anything that happens to reflect the will of the entire group. Our goal is to promote an SFRA that better represents the diversity of its membership, in every sense.

In the meantime, thanks to all those who have stepped up to serve on the awards committees, and to those who will be standing for election to the executive board this fall. We are still looking for help with design work for the new plaques and trophies; if you have experience with this sort of 3D design, or know someone who does, please, reach out to me! We are also still looking for a US-based host for the 2023 conference; if you think your institution might be a good fit for an in-person conference, and think you have the capacity to work with the group to plan one, please, let me know! Thanks again to all those whose labor and generosity help make SFRA work.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 51, no. 2

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Gerry Canavan
Michigan State University

With the May 1 deadline for SFRA21 proposals in the rear view, the next step is putting together the schedule. With more than the usual number of participants across multiple timezones, this is more of a challenge than usual—but we’re hoping to have this information to you very quickly! In the meantime, please pay attention to your email and to the sfra.org website for information on conference registration, access, and other logistics; if you have any questions that aren’t addressed there, please direct them to me at gerry.canavan@marquette.edu or to the organizer, Graham Murphy, at graham.murphy@senecacollege.ca.

We are all very excited about the conference, even as we are filled with nervous energy around the experimental format! We hope the ten-minute “mini-paper” roundtable format we’ve selected will be a success and ask that everyone please try their best to stick within these guidelines as they prepare their papers; I know the temptation to take just an extra couple of minutes will be strong, but we really want to leave as much time for questions and conversation as possible. If you find you have more to say, please take advantage of the opportunity to precirculate your paper. This system worked very well at ICFA and I think it will work well at SFRA too.

After the conference we will be turning our attention to the exec elections; we will be electing a new vice president and new treasurer this fall. If you think you might be willing to serve, please email me for more information! We will also be seeking out new members for the various award committees; if you think you might be willing to serve the organization in this capacity, please contact me as well.

In the meantime, everyone stay well, and power through the end of term as best you can! It’s been a year.