Lisa Yaszek

Artificial Intelligence and Science Fiction. Co-PI: Brian Magerko, Georgia Tech. Awarded $3000 by Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College for the Liberal Arts to develop a new cross-disciplinary class with a multimedia research library and a weekly online lecture series, April 2015.

Women's Work in Early Science Fiction. Awarded $1500 by Georgia Tech’s Center for the Study of Women, Science and Technology to support a student research assistant, August 2013.

Women's Work in Early Science Fiction. Awarded $1500 by Georgia Tech’s Center for the Study of Women, Science and Technology to support a student research assistant, January 2013.

Women's Work in Early Science Fiction. Awarded $20,000 by Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College for the Liberal Arts to support activities related to book publication, March 2012.

Women's Work in Early Science Fiction. Awarded $1500 by Georgia Tech’s Center for the Study of Women, Science and Technology to support a student research assistant, January 2012.

Women's Work in Early Science Fiction. Awarded $700 by the Science Fiction Research Association to support travel for archival research, September 2011.

“Representations of Active Nanostructures across Scientific, Popular and Policy Realms of Discourse.” Co-PIs: Richard Barke, Alan Porter and William Ready, Georgia Institute of Technology. Awarded $85,000.00 by the National Science Foundation, September 2007.

Galactic Suburbia: Housewife Heroines, Lady Scientists and Midcentury Women’s Science Fiction. Awarded $5000.00 by the National Endowment for the Humanities, May 2004.

Women's Science Fiction Stories. (Library of America, forthcoming fall 2018.)

This anthology will feature the most thematically and aesthetically innovative science fiction short stories written by women from the 1920s through the 1970s, before the rise of feminist science fiction. The anthology will include a critical introduction and biographical headnotes as well as a conclusion by a leading contemporary science fiction author who connects the rich history of women's speculative literature with its practice across the globe today.

Afrofuturism in Time and Space. Co-edited with Isiah Lavender III. (Manuscript in progress.)

This anthology will provide readers with an overview of Afrofuturism as an aesthetic practice enabling users to communicate the experience of science, technology, and race across centuries, continents, and cultures.

Including both leading thinkers and emergent voices in science fiction and black studies alike, "Afrofuturism in Time and Space" will be framed with a co-authored introduction that considers Afrofuturism as a still-developing methodological approach to black culture that derives its energy from the coupling of race criticism with science fiction. The anthology will also include cover art by Black Kirby artist John Jennings and a conclusion by groundbreaking Afrofuturist author and editor Sheree R. Thomas.

Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction. Co-edited with Patrick B. Sharp (Wesleyan University Press, 2016).

This anthology shows how women contributed to the development of modern science fiction between 1880 and 1950. It explores how women used their diverse roles as authors, artists, science writers, editors and fans to shape science fiction as a distinct popular form and to participate in debates about the necessary relations of science, society, and gender. It features a wide range of writing and artwork by women involved with the early science fiction community as well as critical essays and headnotes by the editors and a concluding essay by contemporary award-winning science fiction author Kathleen Ann Goonan.

Configurations Special Double Issue on Kim Stanley Robinson 20: 1-2 (Winter-Spring 2012). Co-edited with Doug Davis.

This special issue of the flagship journal for the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts explores how award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson uses science fiction to help us rethink the relations of science and society in profound—and profoundly entertaining—ways. The issue features critical essays and book reviews by leading scholars in both science and science fiction studies as well as an interview with Robinson, conducted by special issue editors Lisa Yaszek and Doug Davis.

Practicing Science Fiction: Critical Essays on Writing, Reading, and Teaching the Genre. Co-edited with Karen Hellekson, Craig B. Jacobsen, and Patrick B. Sharp. (McFarland, 2010).

As the first edited volume if its kind, Practicing Science Fiction shows how the aesthetic, pedagogical, and critical reading practices associated with science fiction make this genre the premiere narrative form of modernity. This is particularly apparent in section 4, where editor Lisa Yaszek and authors Eileen Donaldson, Kristen Lillvis, Rebekah Sheldon, and James H. Thrall explore how and why women have used speculative fiction for well over two centuries to grapple with two fundamental questions: who counts as a hero in a technoscientific world and what story forms best convey this heroism to readers?

Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction (Ohio State University Press, 2008).

This book demonstrates how women writers shaped contemporary representations of gender and technoculture in the decades immediately following World War II. Yaszek contends that women turned to science fiction writing in increasing numbers throughout the 1940s, 50s, and 60s because the genre provided them with allegorical narrative spaces in which to critically assess the new scientific and social relations that emerged at the dawn of the contemporary era. More specifically, authors including Judith Merril, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey, and a host of less-known writers staked claims for women in the American future imaginary by making the gender issues that preoccupied postwar Americans—such as marriage, motherhood, and domesticity—central to the narrative scenarios of modern science fiction.