I guess I could call this low-hanging fruit, but there's something so pathetic about it and yet par for the course. The kicker is the MFA.

My research and publication has primarily focused on one of the most culturally important and globally influential genres of the postwar United States: science fiction. In my work I seek to establish science fiction as a cornerstone for literary study and critical theory, as well as speak to larger questions about the role of the imagination in political and cultural life. My study of science fiction reveals a paradigm that fundamentally structures the way we think about the world; where once the hegemonic language of the future was religious eschatology, I believe it is now predominantly the speculations of science fiction that frame our collective imagination of our possible futures. In our moment, it is science fiction that attempts to articulate the sorts of massive social changes that are imminent, or already happening, and begins to imagine what life on a transformed globe might be like for those who will come to live on it.

Duke University, Durham, NC
Ph.D. in Literature (2012)
Dissertation: Theories of Everything: Science Fiction, Totality, and Empire in the
Twentieth Century
Dissertation Directors: Fredric Jameson and Priscilla Wald
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC
M.F.A. in Creative Writing (2004)
Thesis: Happy Few: Short Stories
Thesis Directors: Lee Zacharias, Michael Parker, and Fred Chappell
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
B.A. summa cum laude in English (with departmental honors) and Philosophy (2002)

repeats and repeats

This volume will convince readers that the swift ascent of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons to worldwide popularity in the 1970s and 1980s is “the most exciting event in popular culture since the invention of the motion picture.

The academic study of the present fantasizes an authority over our lives that experience and history demonstrate we've never had, and from that fantasy, by implication, fantasizes also an authority of the elect over the lives of others. Technocracy, the focus on invention, "creation" as opposed to observation, "communities of choice", ignoring the only community that really matters: the one we're stuck with. The banality of earnest liberalism.  And then the academy institutionalizes art training for the same reason. One more for the shitpile.

Art is observation, not design. If it deals with the past or future, it describes our relation to them, thus describing the present. The hip philosophers who now defend the arts defend them as forms of innovation and discovery. They see artists as they want to see themselves. But Diderot had Greuze; Deleuze had the Beats; Americans have Asimov, Tolkien, and Lovecraft, and Zizek has Udi Aloni.
All evidence enough they miss the point.

Also something on Ranciere I'd forgotten to post.