Anastasia Kilmchynskaya

I am a scholar of nineteenth-century literature with a particular focus on the history of ideas. That is, I am particularly interested in the ways that science, technology, literature, and the cultural imagination intersect, and the ways the anxieties, hopes, and ideologies of a moment in time are captured by a period's "genre" fiction (Gothic, horror, mystery/detective, and science fiction) - that is, the stories often most looked down upon by scholars and critics, and yet those that are most avidly consumed by the mass public. I particularly specialize in nineteenth-century science fiction, and my first monograph, Science Fiction and the Modern World (forthcoming), makes the argument that the emergence of this genre reflects a foundational recalibration of humanity's relationship to the natural world in the West.