University of California, Santa Barbara
People PhD Alumni
PhD Alumni

Leah Norris

PhD Alumna

  • Fax:
    (805) 893-4622
  • Email:
  • Mailing Address:
    English Department UC Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170

 

Leah Faye Norris is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in transatlantic modernism, feminist science fiction, and materialist theories of the posthuman. Leah’s research asks how inherited narratives, technologies, and environments condition cultural perspectives on what is possible for whom. She focuses on 20th and 21st century discourses from Surrealism to Afrofuturism which reconfigure the power dynamics of the present and embrace alien futures.

Research Areas

  • c. 1800-1945
  • c. 1945-present
  • African American and/or African Diasporic Literatures
  • American Literature
  • British Literature
  • Genders and Sexualities
  • Indigenous and/or Decolonial Studies
  • Marxism, Critical Theory, and/or Historical Materialism
  • Science and Technology Studies

Research Center Affiliations

  • Fax:
    (805) 893-4622
  • Email:
  • Mailing Address:
    English Department UC Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170

  • “Sharing outer space: Transcendence and symbiosis in D.C. Fontana’s screenwriting for Star Trek.” Science Fiction Film and Television 15.3 (2022): 337-363.

  • “The Ambivalence of Memory in Naomi Mitchison’s Speculative Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 49.1 (2023).

  • “The Politics of Possibility in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood; Afrofuturist Utopia and American History,” Afrofuturisms: Re-imagining Contemporary Blackness in History, Art, Technology, and Culture. ed. ‘BioDun Ogundayo and Tracee Howell, Lexington Books, 2023.

     

  • “Contagion and Community in Jean Lorrah’s The IDIC Epidemic,” Strange Novel Worlds: Star Trek Novels and Fiction Collections in Popular Culture. ed. Caroline-Isabelle Caron, Queen’s University and Kristin Noone, Irvine Valley College, McFarland & Co, 2023.

     

Courses Taught

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