The work of several former Brittain Postdoctoral Fellows is going to be featured in Like Clockwork: Steampunk Pasts, Presents, and Futures forthcoming this winter from University of Minnesota Press.  For those of us unfamiliar with Steampunk – Steampunk refers to a genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced technology. Once a small subculture, the steampunk phenomenon exploded in visibility during the first years of the twenty-first century, its influence and prominence increasing ever since.  The book is a collection of curated  by authors Rachel Bowser and Brian Croxall. Croxall says the book attempts to ask the question “ Why steampunk?” and, perhaps more importantly, “why steampunk now?”  why did steampunk explode in popularity in the first years of the twenty-first century? What is it about the aesthetic, the themes, or the crosscutting of anachronistic technologies that speaks to so many around the globe? Why did steampunk only become a thing—and a thing that IBM’s social analytics predict will continue to grow—more than 30 years after its invention in the early 1970s? Perhaps it’s not surprising that a genre that celebrates the similarities and disjunctures among times took a while to find its own moment, but our collection identifies specific trends and events to which steampunk as a genre, a fan culture, and art movement respond. The essays in the book address these subjects as well as disability studies, postcolonial studies, digital humanities, Victorian culture, urban studies, performance, graphic novels, film, cultural trauma, and even the question of whether steampunk is “punk enough”. ”  The Brittain Postdoctoral fellow alumni whose work will be featured in the collection will be: 

• Kathryn Crowther (now at Perimeter College at Georgia State University) – “From Steam Arms to Brass Goggles: Steampunk, Prostheses, and Disability”
• Lisa Hager (now at University of Wisconsin–Waukesha) –  “The Alchemy of Aether: Steampunk as Reading Practice in Karina Cooper’s Tarnished and Gilded”
• Joseph Weakland (now at RouteMatch) – “Out of Control: Disrupting Technological Mastery in Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air and K. W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices”
• Roger Whitson (now at Washington State University). – “How to Theorize with a Hammer; or, Making and Baking Things in Steampunk and the Digital Humanities”

 The Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship is a highly selective program that offers faculty members at the Georgia Institute of Technology an opportunity for to develop innovative teaching and scholarship in writing, communication, rhetoric, composition, technical and business communication, creative writing, film studies, performance studies, critical theory, cultural studies, and related fields. The Brittain Fellowship’s history extends over 20 years. Fellow Alumni hold academic and professional positions in universities and industries from around the world. The book will be available for purchase December 2016 onwards. For further details visit : www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/like-clockwork