Ian MacDonald
Ian P. MacDonald is a member of the core science fiction and fantasy faculty in the English Department. He received his doctorate in African literature and postcolonial theory from Columbia University and focuses his scholarship on the intersection of sf and African literature. He teaches courses on sf, fantasy, Afrofuturism and Afrofantasy, Africanfuturism, African literature, and literary-critical theory. His co-edited collection, Science Fiction and the Historical Novel: Days of Future Pasts (w/ Kate Polak, Liverpool UP, 2024) follows up on work by Fredric Jameson who charted a chronological and intellectual affinity between the historical novel and science fiction. The contributors to this edition look at the ways contemporary works straddle this divide and, in so doing, reflect upon sf as historical fiction of the future. His work has appeared in Research in African Literatures, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Literary Geographies as well as in The Routledge Companion to African Literature (eds. Adejunmobi and Coetzee, Routledge, 2019), and is forthcoming in Utopian Studies, Science Fiction Studies, and elsewhere.
Selected Publications
Science Fiction and the Historical Novel: Days of Future Pasts . Liverpool UP, 2024.
Refereed Chapters within Edition
--MacDonald, Ian and Kate Polak. “Introduction: Speculative Histories and Past Futures, Rethinking Memory in the Twenty-first Century.” Science Fiction and the Historical Novel: Days of Future Pasts, edited by Ian MacDonald and Kate Polak, Liverpool UP, 2024, pp. 1-13.
--“‘A Poor Sort of Memory’: Jamais Vu and the Historian as Archive in Tade Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy.” Science Fiction and the Historical Novel: Days of Future Pasts, edited by Ian MacDonald and Kate Polak, Liverpool UP, 2024, pp. 109-128.
“‘Beyond the Present and the Future’: Technophilic Dreams and Technophobic Nightmares in Osiris Rising.” Utopian Studies, vol. 36, no. 2. In Press.
“‘Do You Know Where Home Is?’: Cosmospolitanism and the Earth as Exile in Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Brain Gain Novels.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 52, no. 2. In Press.
“‘May the Guest Come’: African Azimuths of Alien Planetfall.” Literary Geographies, vol. 8, no. 2, 2022, pp. 190-207.
Specialization Areas
Speculative Fiction and Fantasy
African and Diasporic Literature
Postcolonial Literature and Theory
Utopian Literature
Globalization and Cosmopolitanism