Contact: rieder@hawaii.edu
John Rieder taught at UH Manoa’s English Department from 1980, the year he received his Ph.D. from Yale University, until his retirement in 2018. For the first twenty years of his career he was mainly a specialist in English Romanticism, publishing a book on William Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Counterrevolutionary Turn (University of Delaware Press, 1997) and numerous essays on the poetry of Percy Shelley. From around 2000 on his research agenda has focused on science fiction. In 2011 he received the Science Fiction Research Association's Pioneer Award for his essay "On Defining Science Fiction, Or Not: Genre Theory, Science Fiction, and History;" in 2019 the SFRA awarded him its Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. He currently serves on the editorial board of Extrapolation, the oldest journal in the field of science fiction studies, and he remains an active scholar in science fiction studies.
Professor Rieder has also published on fairy tales in cinema and television, in collaboration with Professor Cristina Bacchilega, as well as on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its dramatic and film adaptations, and on problems of periodization, the professionalization of literary studies, and the canon.