John Rieder

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.  

Publications


Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account of SF from the 1960s to the Present. Liverpool UP, October 2021.   Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. Wesleyan UP, 2017.   Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2008.

Areas of Interest


Science fiction, the Gothic, Marxist theory, British Romanticism

Awards


2019: Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement, Science Fiction Research Association. 2018: Cooperint International Visiting Fellow, November-December, University of Verona. 2017: Visiting Eminent Scholar, University of Alabama at Huntsville. 2015: Visiting Scholar in Residence, Sawyer Seminar on Alternative Futurisms, University of California at Riverside. 2011: Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award for Best Essay of 2010, for “On Defining Science Fiction, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History.” 2005: University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Chancellor’s Citation for Meritorious Teaching

Education


BA, University of Cincinnati MA, PhD, Yale University

Courses