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Twitter (Con News)Heather Urbanski
Heather Urbanski holds an MA in Writing from Rowan University and a PhD in English from Lehigh University. Her publications include a bibliographic survey of the genre, Plagues, Apocalypses and Bug-Eyed Monsters: How Speculative Fiction Shows Us Our Nightmares and the 2010 edited collection, Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric, which examines various digital media activities of contemporary fandom. Her next book, Rebooting the Science Fiction Franchise, is under contract with McFarland.
Programming for Heather Urbanski
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| Fri | 11:00 | (A17) | 1 hr |
The Promise and Peril of Rebooting a Beloved Franchise: A Narratological Analysis
Reboots or “reimaginings” must tell a compelling story while handling intense audience expectations. Dr. Urbanski uses narrative theory to examine reboots as a convergence of canon, new visions, and audience expectations, focusing on the reboots as the latest iterations of well-known franchises (such as Star Wars; Battlestar Galactica; Star Trek; and V) and as responses to the vast potential such inter-generational narratives allow. |
| Fri | 16:00 | (A17) | 1 hr |
Scholars, Science Fiction, and the Pursuit of Knowledge
Our panel of scholars discuss their experience working with science fiction in academia, both research and teaching, focusing on how and why they use science fiction in their scholarly work, how that work is received, and how it relates to their work on other topics. |