FAU’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Program a Standout at International Conference With 25 Academic Presentations
Friday, Apr 24, 2026
A record-breaking 19 ֱ̲ Atlantic University students, along with six faculty and staff members, presented their research at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), one of the top scholarly conferences for the study of science fiction and fantasy. While FAU students and faculty have regularly attended this academic conference over its 47-year history, 2026 was a record year for FAU participation with 25 unique FAU presentations.
Most of the students who attended the conference are pursuing the Master of Arts concentration in science fiction and fantasy in the Department of English within FAU’s Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. Two of the students were English undergraduates, while six alumni of the program also presented their work.
“FAU has a long history with ICFA,” said Timothy S. Miller, Ph.D., a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) faculty at FAU. “The conference, and its parent organization, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA), was founded at FAU by English Professor Emeritus and renowned fantasy scholar Bob Collins in 1980.”
FAU is internationally recognized for the study of SFF because it was the first university to establish an M.A. concentration in SFF. It is now competing with a handful of prestigious programs that have since been established around the world.
“FAU is in fact a destination for the study of SFF as evidenced by not only the thriving M.A. concentration and exceptional Ph.D. students focused on this area of study, but also by the exceptional faculty,” said Taryne Jade Taylor, Ph.D., SFF faculty member. “The program has 15 SFF faculty members – three core faculty members, 10 affiliated faculty members, and two professor emeriti who work on SFF across various literary traditions and historical periods.”
Students have long been involved in the ICFA conference organization. Most recently, Alex Banks, a doctoral student in FAU’s comparative studies program, was elected to serve on the IAFA board as the student caucus representative. At ICFA 2025, SFF M.A. student Miranda Miller won the prestigious David G. Hartwell Award for best student paper, a particularly impressive accomplishment given that the award is usually given to an advanced Ph.D. student.
“Whether it be works like Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ R.L. Stevenson’s ‘Jekyll & Hyde,’ E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops,’ George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ or later, the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing, the 20 th century has been defined by the kinds of future-oriented speculation that marks the genre in these work,” said Ian MacDonald, Ph.D., SFF faculty member.
This year’s presentations included such topics as, “KPop Demon Hunters;” BookTok and the rise of “romantasy;” Latinx speculative fiction; artificial intelligence narratives; Japanese folktales; modern translations of “Beowulf;” the rhetoric of cookbooks; memory in digital games; theories of fantasy in Tolkien and Lord Dunsany; representations of speculative plants; faith and Afrofantasy; neurodiversity and worldbuilding in metal music; different conceptions of identity in epic fantasy; Afrofuturist “genre disobedience;” chivalry in contemporary science fiction; “Sinners, Watchmen, A Game of Thrones;” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
“One of the reasons to study science fiction and fantasy at FAU is because my fellow faculty and I are well-known in the field due to our publications, and also because we invest considerable energy into mentoring our students to help them publish their work, present at conferences, and network,” said Taylor.“
During this year alone our faculty and students produced 33 SFF publications in print. This included 17 scholarly articles and book chapters, 11 book reviews and five short stories. Two of those essays were co-authored by Miller alongside FAU students Teddy Valentine and Arwen Parades.
FAU student publications include, but are not limited to, SFF M.A. student Ashley Perry’s review of Christina H. Hodel’s scholarly book “Disney Channel’s Extraordinary Girls: Gender in 2000’s Tween Sitcoms” in the journal, Science Fiction Film and Television; Banks’ essay “Magneto’s Power to Survive the Holocaust: Examining the Fantastic Relationship Between Character and Setting in Greg Pak’s “X-Men: Magneto Testament” in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts;Miller’s essay, “Parasitism, Coexistence, and Colonialism in Animorphs,” also in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts;” MFA student Sarah V. Dumitrascu’s review of Laura R. Kremmel’s “Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies in Extrapolation,” and SFF M.A. student Rachel Martin’s review of Nnedi Okorafor’s “Lagoon in Climate Lit Magazine.”
Faculty highlights include, but are not limited to, MacDonald’s essay, “‘Do You Know Where Home Is?’: Cosmopolitanism and the Earth as Exile in Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Brain Gain Novels,” in “Science Fiction Studies;” Miller’s book chapter, “The Rise of the Artificial Boyfriend: Artificial Partners Past, Present, and Future,” in “The Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature;” Taylor’s interview, “Biological Haunting: An Interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia on Adaptation, Genre, Eugenics, and Fungi” in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts; the essay of Carissa Ma, Ph.D., “Deconstructing Neoliberalism’s Promise: Chan Koonchung’s “The Fat Years and the Potential for Change in the Present-as-Impasse” in “Modern Chinese Literature and Culture;” Ziona Kocher’s, Ph.D., “Fops, Mermaids, and Viking Vampire Clowns: Queer Masculinities in Our Flag Means Death;” and the horror story by Taylor Hagood, Ph.D., titled “A Helping Hand” in “Macabre Magazine.”
“We have really exciting opportunities on the horizon as we approach the 25 th anniversary of the SFF M.A.,” said Taylor. “Local anesthesiologist and eminent SFF pulp and rare book collector Dr. Richard Meli recently made an exciting donation to FAU SFF. He has donated some of his collection of SFF pulp magazines that date as far back to the 1920s, and span what we call SFF’s Golden Age.”
For more information about FAU’s Science Fiction and Fantasy, visit Science Fiction & Fantasy | ֱ̲ Atlantic University .
