Hilary Strang

Senior Instructional Professor, Humanities and the College, Affiliate Faculty, Department of English and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality

I’m the director of MAPH and a Senior Instructional Professor in the humanities, English and gender studies. I started at MAPH as a preceptor, when I was doing my Ph.D. in English here at U of C, and I’ve worked full-time for MAPH in various capacities since 2009. I work on and teach science fiction as a way of thinking and feeling beyond capitalism into collective, communal life. I’m particularly interested in the feminist utopian SF of the 1970s, environmental and ecological SF, and utopia and utopianism, as well as Marxist and communist theory. I’ve advised MAPH theses on solarpunk, femininity and artificial intelligence, Jamaica Kincaid, George Eliot, Ursula Le Guin, and a fantastic array of other topics (MAPH students are amazing!). Outside the university, I've taught in adult and community-based education programs for many years, and I also co-host a podcast on science fiction and utopia.
 

Ectogenes and others: science fiction, feminism, reproduction (Winter 2026)
(ENGL 21700/41700) Crosslistings: GNSE 41700, MAPH 41700

Recent work in feminist theory and feminist studies of science and technology has reopened and reconfigured questions around reproduction, embodiment, and social relations. Sophie Lewis’s account of “uterine geographies” and Michelle Murphy’s work on chemical latency and “distributed reproduction” stand as examples of this kind of work, which asks us to think about embodied life beyond the individual (and the human) and to see ‘biological reproduction’ in expansive and utopian ways. Social reproduction theory might be an example in a different key, as might recent Marxist and communist accounts of the gendering of labor under capital. Such investigations have a long (though sometimes quickly passed over) history in feminist thought (Shulamith Firestone’s call for ectogenic reproduction is a famous example), and in the radical reimaginings of personhood, human/nature relations, and sexing and gendering of feminist science fiction. Indeed, the work of science fiction around these questions may be a whole other story than the one told by theory. This class will ask students to think between feminist science and technology studies, theoretical approaches to questions around social and biological reproduction, and the opening up of reproductive possibility found in feminist science fiction. SF authors may include Kate Wilhelm, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Naomi Mitchison, and M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, among others. (Fiction 20th/21st)

Rewild, repair, restore! Science fictions of life-making in the aftermath (Spring 2026)
(ENGL 21730/41730) Crosslistings: CEGU 21730/41730, MAPH 41730

Science fiction has long imagined human relations persisting and transforming on the ruined earth. Indeed, science fiction imaginaries offered horizons for human, and more-than-human, environmental and social restoration long before most cultural forms began to grapple with what we sometimes still call “climate change.” This class reads science fiction (mostly American, written from the 1960s-2020s), alongside environmental and social theory to begin to ask what it might take to live toward and in conditions of repair, and what repair and restoration seem to mean in our current moment. We will be particularly interested in where and how environmental restoration intersects with conceptions of social repair, collective life-building and liberation. What might repair require in scenes not only of environmental devastation, but of state violence, settler colonialism, racial capitalism and the uneven distribution of dispossession and loss? If restoration is a process and not a destination, what might the daily life under conditions of repair be? What possibilities for transformed collective life and relations might be opened up by processes of repair? What might not be reparable, or when and where might repair need to stop? We’ll engage these questions and more by thinking and imagining with environmental theory, theories of settler colonialism and racial capital, feminist theories of reproduction, communization theory and science fiction. SF authors will likely include Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, Vonda McIntyre, M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi and more. (Fiction 20th/21st)