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Terry Harpold

Associate Professor

Contact Information

Email: tharpold

Terry Harpold (PhD, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida. His research and teaching interests include environmental humanities, science fiction and film, animal studies, digital humanities, image-text studies, and psychoanalysis. He is a member of UF’s Digital Humanities Working Group, co-founder of the Science Fiction Working Group, and founder of UF’s Imagining Climate Change initiative. From 2013–16 he was the Department of English’s Director of Graduate Student Teaching and General Education. Nominated four times for College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Mentoring and Teaching Awards, he was a winner of CLAS Teaching Awards in 2008 and 2020. From 2017–2020 he was University of Florida Term Professor.

He is the author of Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (University of Minnesota Press, 2008); co-editor, with Daniel Compère and Volker Dehs, of Collectionner l’Extraordinaire, sonder l’Ailleurs. Essais sur Jules Verne en hommage à Jean-Michel Margot (Encrage Edition / L’Association des Amis du Roman Populaire, 2015); and coeditor, with Pasqual Bernat, Nicolás J. Moragues González, Ariel Pérez Rodríguez, Cristian Tello, and Volker Dehs, of Ciencia, literatura e imaginación (Ediciones Paganel, 2015). Recent essays by Harpold have appeared in journals such as Digital Humanities QuarterlyGalaxiesImageTexTScience Fiction Film and TelevisionScience Fiction Studies, and Verniana; and in edited collections such as The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019) and Los viajes extraordinarios de Jules Verne (2018).

He is a member of the editorial boards of ImageTexTPostmodern Culture, and The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction; a founding member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Verniana: Jules Verne Studies / Etudes Jules Verne; and a Trustee of the Board of Directors of the North American Jules Verne Society. In 2014, Harpold founded the International Association for the Fantastic in the Art’s annual Walter James Miller Memorial Award for Student Scholarship in the International Fantastic. He is also Director of the IAFA’s Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for scholarly essays on the fantastic written in a language other than English.

His articles and chapters in press (January 2020) include essays on the middle voice in the graphic eco-nonfiction of Philippe Squarzoni, and Jules Verne’s interest in the 1888 Mars opposition and contemporaneous debates regarding evidence for life on Mars.

His current scholarly writing projects include essays on literary-critical rheology and the figure of the “sublime-abject” in climate fiction by Jean-Marc Ligny and Alexis Wright, vegetarianism and veganism in the fiction of obsessively carnist Jules Verne; Verne and his illustrators’ depictions of American abolitionist John Brown; a journal special issue on “Science Fiction, Radical Visioning, and Social Justice” (coedited with Karina Vado); and two book-length projects, Des leçons d’abîme, on image-text relays in Verne’s illustrated fiction, and Beware the Blob, on the sublime-abject in contemporary climate fiction and film.