Please join us for the next CuSPP Seminar online on Thursday, 29 February from 1-2pm. Please refer to the CuSPP email or email Wesley.Lim@anu.edu.au for the link.

This thesis proposal explores the relationship between science and science fiction in Australian newspapers of the early 20th century through the lenses of digital humanities (DH), genre, science fiction studies (SFS), science and technology studies (STS), and through a creative component in the form of a digital scholarly edition critiquing several early SF works from the period. Through this multidisciplinary approach, and working with fiction in the To Be Continued database and concurrent science articles in the Trove database, the research will contribute to a greater understanding of the role newspaper fiction played in early 20^th century Australia, as well as expand on the knowledge domains of science fiction publishing history, socio-political influences on science fiction, the kinds of science featured in fiction at the time, and what it means for Australian cultural identity.

Neil Hogan is a PhD student and researcher at the ANU School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, and is involved with the ‘to be continued’ project which recovers and makes available lost works of fiction from Australian newspapers. He is also editor and publisher of the semiprozine Alien Dimensions which ‘puts the science back into science fiction.’ He advocates for the low cost republishing of early 20^th century science fiction literature so that future readers can rediscover the origins of SF.