Sep 14, 2023
Dr. Alison Sperling | Dresden Junior Fellow at the Chair of North American Literature and Future Studies | August 2023
Dr. Alison Sperling currently works as an Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University, USA. During her stay as a fellow, she supported Jun.-Prof. Moritz Ingwersen at Disruptive Imaginations: The Annual Conference of the Science Fiction Research Association and the Society for Fantasy Research. The collaboration builds on cooperations between Dr. Sperling and Jun.-Prof. Moritz Ingwersen since 2021, including joint conference papers, and a jointly held online seminar on the theme Global Weirding that was recognized with the TU Dresden Award for Diversity-Sensitive Teaching 2022.
Dr. Sperling is one of the internationally most renowned cultural scholars in the field of Speculative Fiction Studies with a unique research profile on the negotiation of emancipatory futures, queer-feminist science and technology studies and representations of the climate crisis in literature and art. Already during her time as a postdoc at the renowned Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin and at the Center for Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies at the TU Berlin, she contributed significantly to the internationalization of Speculative Fiction Studies in Germany. Through her commitment as a curator of international dialogue and exhibition formats in Berlin, she has also opened up a high-profile network of artists for the interface of cultural studies, science and art in Germany.
In the context of the Disruptive Imaginations Conference at TU Dresden in August 2023, she curated the evening event Contactics: Science Fiction in Performance with the internationally renowned performance artists Irina Gheorghe, Emma Waltraud Howesand Justin F. Kennedy.
