[Sfts-faculty] Tomorrow! 12:30p.m. Octavia E. Butler's Archive and Climate Change

[andré carrington]

The Unarchiving Blackness Mellon Sawyer Seminar hosts a conversation on Octavia
E. Butler's Archive & Climate Change, featuring scholars Alyssa Collins,
and Ayana Jamieson, moderated by Professor Jade Sasser of the Department of
Gender & Sexuality Studies. Butler was a visionary science fiction and
fantasy author whose novels and stories wrestled with changes to our world
and its people, including a future California. Our speakers have worked
firsthand with her archive at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. They
share their insights with us as part of our Spring 2023 focus on
Technology, Afrofuturism, and Black Speculative Practices.

The event will take place in person at *Humanities 1500*, at 12:30p.m., on
Thursday, May 4. It will also be live-streamed on Zoom. To RSVP, use
tinyurl.com/BUTLERxUCR.

Please, invite your colleagues, students, classes, and interested parties
for what's sure to be a lively discussion! There will be refreshments.

Ayana Jamieson, PhD is an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at Cal Poly
Pomona, a mythologist, and depth psychologist. She is the founder of the
Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, a global community founded in 2011,
committed to highlighting Octavia Butler’s life and work while creating new
works inspired by Butler’s legacy. Dr. Jamieson’s essay, “Far Beyond the
Stars” appears in the Black Futures anthology. She has also published at
The Feminist Wire, Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from
Speculative Fiction, Public Books, Sierra Club Magazine and elsewhere. She
was a featured speaker at the New York Times “A New Climate” on climate
change.

Alyssa Collins, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of English and African
American Studies at the University of South Carolina. She also served as
the inaugural Huntington Library Octavia E. Butler Fellow from 2021-2022.
Her research focuses on black life, humanity, and technology as represented
in the presents and futures of black speculative fiction. Currently, she is
working on her first book, *Cellular Blackness: Black Feminist Posthuman
Ontologies*, an investigation of moments of black female embodiment, human
evolution and symbiosis, and black posthumanity as established and
represented in the work of Octavia E. Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and other
contemporary black science fiction writers.

-- 
andré m. carrington

Associate Professor of English
University of California, Riverside
--
Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction
<https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/speculative-blackness>
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