Michael Horka

Introduction

Dr. Horka is interested in the cultural politics of climate change. He is particularly interested in the ways that science and speculative fiction help us to understand the interrelation of ecological and political-economic change since the 1970s.

Research Interests

• Literary studies
• science and speculative fiction
• the critique of political economy
• environmental humanities

Courses Taught

• AMS 205 - Introduction to American Cultures
• AMS 207 - America: Global and Intercultural Perspectives
• AMS 302 - Immigrant America

Education

• PhD, George Washington University
• MA, George Washington University
• BA, University of Michigan-Dearborn

Publications

• “Beyond the Novel: The Plural Nature of Climate Fictions.” Review of Climate Fictions, special issue of Paradoxa, ed. Alison Sperling. Science Fiction Studies 49, no. 3 (Nov 2022): 595-598.
• “Heyiya.” In An Ecotopian Lexicon, eds. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019) 99-109.

Work in Progress

My book project, The Speculative Climate and the Long Crisis, examines prose science fictional representations of climate change since the dawn international climate governance. I argue that the genre dramatizes how climate change is a historical phenomenon. It is in works of science and speculative fiction that the interrelation of ecological and political-economic crisis become historically legible; moreover, the limitations of periodizing this crisis are modeled by the same texts. I claim that leading cultural and literary periodization theories are shown by these works of SF to be limited and in need of intervention.