Hilary Strang

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

I’m the director of MAPH and a senior lecturer in the Humanities. 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 teach literature and theory in a free college-credit humanities program called the Odyssey Project, and I’m part of the Clearing School, a teaching and learning collective offering non-institutional, non-hierarchical, community-oriented classes for adults. I also co-host a podcast on the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson and utopias of many kinds.

 

Rocks, plants, ecologies: science fiction and the ‘more-than-human’ [Winter 2024]

Science fictional worlds are full of entities more familiar and perhaps less noticeable than the aliens that are often thought to typify the genre. Rock formations, plants, metallic seams, plastics, crystalline structures, nuclear waste and oozing seepages are among the entities that allow SF to form estranging questions about what it means to be in relation to others, what it means to live in and through an environment, and what it means to form relations of sustenance and communal possibility with those who do not or cannot return human care and recognition. Such questions about are urgent ones for thinking about climate catastrophe, capital, settler colonialism and endemic pandemics, as well as for thinking substantively about resistance and what life and livable worlds beyond the bleak horizons of the capitalocene could be. This class will engage science fiction (authors may include Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeff Vandermeer and more) and environmental and social theory of various kind (authors may include Elizabeth Povinelli, Katherine Yusoff, Andreas Malm, Eduardo Kohn, James C. Scott, David Graeber, Jasper Bernes, Mike Davis and more). [MAPH/English]


Science fiction against the state [Spring 2024]

Ursula Le Guin’s anarchist utopia, The Dispossessed, was published 50 years ago, but its complex imagining of a whole way of life without law, police, money or sovereignty, and its investment in thinking that way of living in relation to environment, gender, freedom and work offers a science fictional horizon for what it might be to live communally in our own moment. This course will read The Dispossessed and other science fiction that imagines what it might mean to live against, beyond or without the state, alongside theorizations that may help us formulate our own visions of other possible worlds. We will pay particular attention to questions of environment and ecological relations, race, gender and social reproduction, and feminist utopias. We’ll also spend some time thinking about actually existing forms of living against the state (including blockades, encampments, autonomous zones). SF authors may include Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tade Thompson, Sally Gearhart, Iain Banks, and ME O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Other authors read may include Saidiya Hartman, Monique Wittig, Fredy Perlman, James Scott, Pierre Clastres, and David Graeber. [MAPH/English]