Terry Harpold (PhD, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of English. His research and teaching are focused on the poetics and ethics of environmental transformation and climate change, with an emphasis on intersectional (human) and interspecies (more than human) approaches to environmental justice, equity, and resilience. He is also a scholar of science fiction literature and film from the mid-nineteenth century through to the contemporary era. A co-founder of UF’s Science Fiction Working Group, and founder and Director of UF’s Imagining Climate Change initiative, he is the Assistant Director for Humanities Research of UF’s Astraeus Space Institute.
From 2013–16 Harpold 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.
He 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 publications by Harpold have appeared in journals such as Ecozon@, Épistémocritique, Galaxies, 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), Jules Verne Lives! Essays on His Works and Legacy (2023), An Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators (2024), and Teaching Science Fiction in the Literature Classroom (2025).
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: a cross-reading of Vinciane Despret’s novella Autobiographie d’un poulpe [Autobiography of an octopus, 2021] with Georges Bataille’s novella Madame Edwarda (1941); a related sketch of a conjectural Bataillean blue ecopoetics; an essay on the origin of the fatalist arc of environmental science fiction in the Second Law of Thermodynamics; and an attempt to determine the mysterious firing date of the Columbiad, the giant cannon that launches the astronauts of Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune [From the Earth to the Moon, 1865] and Autour de la Lune [Around the Moon, 1869], based on data from nineteenth-century ephemerides.
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 environmental fiction, poetry, and film.
Contact
- office: Turlington Hall 4105
- voice: (352) 294-2808
- fax: (352) 392-0860
- email: <tharpold@ufl.edu>
- Professor Harpold’s website