Background & Expertise
Dr. Yaszek was recently featured and interviewed in ARTSATL
Excerpt from Muriel Vega's Article (available in full via link below)
Lisa Yaszek holds an unusual position at Georgia Tech: Professor of Science Fiction Studies. In her academic work, the self-proclaimed devoted Star Trek fan primarily focuses on recovering the lost voices of science fiction and discovering new ones, with a special emphasis on women and people of color.
She also explores how scientists engage the language of science fiction in their arguments for and against certain lines of research, something that’s particularly interesting to do at a place like Georgia Tech, she says. Georgia Tech is not only renowned for its innovative work in the realms of science and technology, but it was also one of the first universities to ever offer science fiction classes for credit in the early 1970s, and today it possesses one of the top 20 science fiction research collections in the world.
As part of her work in discovering and sharing lost voices, Yaszek has written or co-written several books that present women writers’ perspectives on the future and celebrate their work: Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction and Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction.
Her latest book, The Future is Female!, highlights 25 stories written between the 1920s and the advent of the feminist movements of the 1970s. The stories present a range of characters, from alien warrior queens to fighting housewives and heroic astronauts, while speculating about the possible futures of society, technology and gender itself. “I hope that readers will leave these stories feeling inspired to make their own mark on the future, whether that mark is literary or scientific,” Yaszek says.
Read the rest here.
