Terry Harpold (PhD, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of English. His research and teaching are focused primarily on the poetics and ethics of environmental crisis and climate change, with particular focus on intersectional approaches that account for the roles of gender and queerness, race, class, indigeneity, and species in environmental justice and resilience.
He is also a scholar of science fiction literature and film from the mid-nineteenth century through to the contemporary era. He is a member of UF’s Digital Humanities Working Group, co-founder of the Science Fiction Working Group, and founder and Director 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 five times for College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Mentoring and Teaching Awards, he was a winner of the CLAS Teacher of the Year Award in 2008 and 2020, and CLAS’s nominee for the University-wide Teacher of the Year Award in 2020.
Harpold is the author of Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008); and 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 (2015). Recent essays by Harpold have appeared in journals such as Digital Humanities Quarterly, Épistémocritique, Galaxies, ImageTexT, Science Fiction Film and Television, Science Fiction Studies, and Verniana; and in edited collections such as Los viajes extraordinarios de Jules Verne (2018), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019), EcoComix: Essays on the Environment in Comics and Graphic Novels (2020), and An Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators (2022).
He is a member of the editorial boards of ImageTexT, Journal of Posthumanism, and Postmodern Culture; 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, for which he is the Jury Chair. 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 scholarly writing projects in press or in progress include essays on: anguish and ecstasy of the “formless” (French philosopher Georges Bataille’s l’informe) in eco-fiction by Vinciane Despret, Donna Haraway, Jean-Marc Ligny, and Jeff VanderMeer; greening the self and releasing sovereign growth in the experience of planting trees; vegetarianism and veganism in the fiction of obsessively carnist Jules Verne; Verne’s and his illustrators’ depictions of the American abolitionist John Brown; Verne’s influence on the Hollow Earth mythos; and why the film and television adaptations of The Mysterious Island are mostly terrible (!)
He is working on three book-length projects: an edited collection of essays, Plant Life: Exploring Vegetal Worlds in the Harn Museum Collection, a collection of essays co-edited with M. Elizabeth Ginway, Latin America Writes Back: Political and Ecological Crisis in Science Fiction, and a single-author monograph, Beware the Blob, on the poetics of “unquiet matter” in contemporary climate fiction and film.
Contact
- office: Turlington Hall 4105
- voice: (352) 294-2808
- fax: (352) 392-0860
- email: <tharpold@ufl.edu>
- Professor Harpold’s website