John Rieder

I have been teaching at UH Manoa’s English Department since 1980, the year I received my Ph. D. from Yale University. For the first twenty years of my career I was mainly a specialist in English Romanticism, publishing a book on William Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Counterrevolutionary Turn (University of Delaware Press, 1997) and numerous essays on the poetry of Percy Shelley. For the last ten years my research agenda has focused on science fiction. My book on early science fiction, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2008. Other recent and forthcoming pieces on science fiction include work on film and genre theory as well as early sf and colonial ideology.

I have also published on horror cinema, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its dramatic and film adaptations, and on problems of periodization, the professionalization of literary studies, and the canon, as well as writing reviews of contemporary poetry and venturing an occasional essay on nonsense poetry or children's literature.

In recent years my graduate teaching has been about equally divided between courses on science fiction and courses on literary and cultural theory. I received the University of Hawai`i at Manoa’s Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence in Teaching in 2005.

Science fiction, the Gothic, Marxist theory, British Romanticism

BA, University of Cincinnati
MA, PhD, Yale University