Monthly Archives: May 2018

Prof. Lavelle Porter Speaks on Teaching and Samuel R. Delany at SFRA 2018

English Professor Lavelle Porter will discuss his Fall 2017 English 3403: One Major Writer class on the SF writer Samuel R. Delany at an upcoming roundtable panel on “Reimagining Race and Racism through SF” at this year’s annual meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) held at Marquette University from July 1-4, 2018. The SFRA is the oldest professional organization devoted to the research and teaching of SF, and its annual meeting attracts an international audience of scholars. Full details of Prof. Porter’s roundtable are below, and the full conference schedule is available here.

Monday, July 2, 2018, 2:00-3:30pm
ROUNDTABLE: REIMAGINING RACE AND RACISM THROUGH SF
Moderator: Andrew Hageman, Luther College
Stina Attebery
Novian Whitsitt
Lavelle Porter
Isiah Lavender III

“In Search of Samuel R. Delany”

In this presentation I will discuss my experiences in the Fall of 2017 when I taught a course at the New York City College of Technology, CUNY on the work of Samuel R. Delany. The course was part of my department’s “English 3403: One Major Writer” series, and it was also related to ongoing initiatives in science fiction and pedagogy at City Tech. The Ursula C. Schwerin Library at City Tech recently acquired an archive of science fiction material, and our English department regularly offers courses on science fiction. My course was titled “Samuel R. Delany: Science Fiction and the City,” and it was organized as an introduction to Delany’s writing in science fiction and other genres, including criticism, memoir, and literary fiction. The main texts included Aye, and Gomorrah, Babel-17, and Atlantis: Model 1924. This ended up being a small course with six students. As a college with a vocational and technical focus, none of the students in the course were English majors, and none of them had heard of the writer before the class. We discussed Delany’s role in the development of Afrofuturism, his family’s background in Harlem, his writing on queer life before and after Stonewall, and the significance of the city as a concept in his work. The semester was capped off with a public reading by Delany who was the keynote speaker for our second annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium.

Lavelle Porter is an Assistant Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. He holds a B.A. in history from Morehouse College, and a Ph. D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. His writing has appeared in venues such as The New Inquiry, Poetry Foundation, Callaloo and JSTOR Daily, and he is a regular contributor to Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. He is currently working on a book titled The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education and the Black Intellectual.

Prof. Lucas Kwong’s ENG2420 Science Fiction Class Visits the City Tech SF Collection

City Tech Science Fiction Collection Presentation

Today, Prof. Lucas Kwong brought his ENG2420 Science Fiction students to visit the City Tech Science Fiction Collection as a part of their final paper research. The goal of the visit was to introduce students to SF magazine culture by inviting students to see, hold, and browse a selection of different kinds of magazines held in the collection.

Consulting with Prof. Kwong before the class, Prof. Jason Ellis pulled a selection of magazines that students could read in the Archives classroom:

Analog Science Fiction and Fact (with fan letters)
June 1995
July 1995 (check out this editorial)
Aug 1995
Sept 1995

Amazing Stories (with fan letters)
Jan 1985
Mar 1985
May 1985
July 1985

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (no fan letters)
Aug 1989
Sept 1989
Oct 1989
Nov 1989

Vertex (no fan letters)
Jun 1973 (article on water and ecological catastrophe)
Feb 1974 (Joanna Russ’ famous “Image of Women in Science Fiction” essay)
Apr 1974 (interview with Harlan Ellison–I can tell the class about Ellison’s history in Red Hook)
June 1974 (Poul Anderson’s reply to Joanna Russ’ essay)
Oct 1974 (Philip K. Dick’s reply to to Joanna Russ)

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (Brooklyn’s own, with fan letters)
Nov 1991
Dec 1991
Mid-Dec 1991
Jan 1992

Omni
June 1981
Aug 1981
Sept 1981
July 1982 (William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome”–introduction of the word cyberspace to English lexicon)

After meeting the students outside the library, Profs. Kwong and Ellis led the students to the fifth floor of the library and the Archives classroom where they met with Prof. Keith Muchowski, who arranged for the Archives class visit. Prof. Ellis delivered a brief oral history of the collection and talked about SF magazines in general (presentation file embedded above). Then, Prof. Kwong asked his students to study and discover interesting things in the magazines that we handed out. After making the rounds of each group of students, Prof. Kwong asked students to mingle around and see how their first magazines are similar to and different than the other magazines. While students were looking at these magazines, some asked Prof. Ellis for specific issues and books in the collection, which he brought out for them to see for their research.

This is one model for students visiting the City Tech SF Collection. If you’d like to bring your class to the archives, please reach out to Prof. Keith Muchowski (kmuchowski at citytech.cuny.edu). If you’d like help planning the visit or would like me to talk about the collection to students, feel free to email me (jellis at citytech.cuny.edu).

Philip K. Dick Books Now in the City Tech Science Fiction Collection

Hounion and Muchowski

Library Professors Morris Hounion and Keith Muchowski (pictured above, l to r) cleared an entire shelving unit (no small feat considering the college’s archival holdings) for the approximately twelve boxes of unshelved materials from the original donation and English Professor Aaron Barlow’s recent Philip K. Dick book donation. I filled several shelves with the PKD books (pictured below), which leaves three-and-a-half shelves available for boxed materials.

PKD books