The ‘First Contact’ Research Cluster
First Contact is a group of researchers at Birkbeck College in the School of Arts, both faculty and students. Our work is focused on science fiction, weird fiction and ‘slipstream’ literature, but investigates the implications of technocultural transformation in modern narrative through a wide diversity of forms that include literature, film, comics, photography, art, and cultural history. We meet informally as a support group for our individual projects and to explore the potential for collaboration. We meet formally through Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature, but like to think we are slowly corrupting its DNA to produce new kinds of hybrid monsters.
Our ambition is to set up a series of Futurological Congresses to explore a number of inter-related SFnal themes. Since we are all committed to the idea that this fiction is good to think with, we envisage First Contact as a think tank dedicated to wrestling the future back from apocalyptic forces intent on cancelling it.
Recent publication highlights:
Martin Eve, Password (Bloomsbury, 2016)
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, edited by Roger Luckhurst (Oxford World’s Classics, 2017)
Faculty includes:
Heike Bauer teaches on 21st century feminism and fiction and writes on graphic narratives, co-editing special issues of Studies in Comics and Journal of Lesbian Studies.
Mark Blacklock teaches Science Fiction at Birkbeck and convenes the MA in Cultural and Critical Studies. His first monograph, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2017, investigates the roots of the science-fictional idea of higher-dimensional space, reading its imaginative forms in work by H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft. He has recently published articles on Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High Rise and New Horror Theories and is planning a research project into science-fictional languages. Dr Blacklock is also a novelist and writer for the national press.
Joseph Brooker is Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck: author of books on Irish modernism and on British writers of the 1980s, he is now writing a book centred around the US novelist Jonathan Lethem which explores questions of genre hybridity, the relations of SF to mainstream fiction and other genres, and new connections between contemporary writing and literary history.
Caroline Edwards is completing a book about time in contemporary fiction. She is co-editor with Tony Venezia of China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015). An expert on dystopian and utopian narratives, she is often invited to discuss these topics in public forums and national media. Dr Edwards is currently co-editing a Special Collection on ‘Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy’ with Graeme Macdonald for the Open Library of Humanities.
Martin Eve specialises in contemporary American fiction (primarily the works of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace), histories and philosophies of technology, and technological mutations in scholarly publishing. He is the author of four books, Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Password (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), and Literature Against Criticism: University English & Contemporary Fiction in Conflict (Open Book Publishers, 2016). He has also published numerous articles on contemporary fiction and theory.
Grace Halden has particular interest and expertise in the subjects of representations of technology and the philosophy of technology in modern and contemporary literature. Her PhD thesis concentrated on how technology has been viewed in popular culture (through the lens of science fiction) since 1945. Her monograph, Three Mile Island: Nuclear Power in American Popular Culture, is published by Routledge. Dr Halden’s research interests regarding technology include artificial intelligence, posthumanism, and life extension technologies and their depiction in popular culture. She also researches and teaches on the links between human condition, human rights, and technological influence, including war technologies, social media, and bioengineering.
Roger Luckhurst is a professor of modern literature at Birkbeck. He has written books on J. G. Ballard, telepathy, mummy curses and zombies, and a cultural history of science fiction. He has contributed to the Blackwell Companion to SF, the Oxford Handbook of SF, and the Routledge Companion to SF, and also written many essays on horror, weird fiction and the Gothic. He advised the BFI on their Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film and Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder seasons, and wrote the BFI Classics books for The Shining (2013) and Alien (2014). He was co-funded by the AHRC/Creative Works scheme to work on the Geek Pound Project with Tom Hunter, chair of the annual Arthur C. Clarke award. Forthcoming work includes an edition of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (2017), the essay, ‘The Weird: A Dis/Orientation’ for Textual Practice, and, as editor, Science Fiction: A Literary History for the British Library Press (due in 2017). He is writing a cultural history of the corridor for Reaktion (due in 2018), which will feature lots of spaceships probably. See here for full publication list.
Affiliated researchers include:
Christos Callow completed his PhD under the supervision of Caroline Edwards and Toby Litt. Organizer of several conferences on Science Fiction Theatre and involved in teaching 21st-century literature, he is also co-editor with Anna McFarlane of Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2016).
Rhodri Davies is a scholar of science fiction, writing a PhD thesis entitled ‘“Post- and Transhuman Spiritualities and the Singularity’.
Tom Dillon is writing a doctoral thesis about the magazine New Worlds and its contribution to the New Wave of SF.
Catherine Flay recently completed a PhD at Birkbeck on the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, which explored Pynchon’s use of genres including SF.
Matthew Harle recently completed a PhD at Birkbeck on unfinished projects and is now a postdoctoral researcher based at the Barbican; he is co-organizer of a forthcoming BFI conference, supported by Birkbeck, centred on the 1970s television programme Penda’s Fen.
Hallvard Haug has written a PhD thesis on science and the posthuman. A scholar of SF, he has also been a co-organizer of the comics symposium Transitions.
James Machin has completed a PhD on British Weird Fiction; he co-organized a conference and edited an edition of Textual Practice on The Weird.
Aren Roukema is writing a PhD thesis on science fiction and religious thought.
Natalia Tobin is currently a doctoral student, writing a thesis on the para-cyberpunk SF writer, Jack Womack.
Tony Venezia completed his PhD at Birkbeck on history in the work of Alan Moore. A key figure in the field of comics studies, he is founder of the annual symposium Transitions and the editor and author of several articles and collections in the field of graphic narratives. He is on the editorial board for the journal Studies in Comics, and on the judging panel for the inaugural James Herbert Horror Writing Prize.
Yutaka Okuhata is working on a PhD that historicizes the work of Angela Carter. He attends the London SF reading group at Birkbeck.
Image by Stephen Rahn, used under a CC BY-NC 2.0 licence.
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