De Witt Douglas Kilgore (Email; phone 812-855-4148)
Assistant Professor of English and American Studies
PhD: Brown University, American Civilization, 1994

RESEARCH INTERESTS
Twentieth century American literature and culture. Science and Literature: popular science; science fiction; cultural history of science and technology. African American literature. Urban studies, architectural and design theory and visual culture.

Click here for further information regarding Professor Kilgore's work in 20th Century Literature and culture.

Click here for further information regarding Professor Kilgore's work in American Literature.

PARTIAL LIST OF PUBLICATIONS and PRESENTATIONS
Work in Progress:
The Wonderful Dream: Science, Race and Fictions of an American Future in Space.
A critical investigation of the technoscientific narratives which have emerged from the twentieth century spaceflight movement. The book examines fictional and non-fictional tales of technological conquest and scientific utopia which argue that the high frontier can solve mid-century troubles around race and gender through the creation of new wealth and cultural opportunity.

"Changing Regimes: Vonda N. McIntyre's Parodic Astrofuturism," Science-Fiction Studies (forthcoming July 2000).

"Engineer's Dreams: Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, and Astrofuturism in the 1950s," Canadian Review of American Studies 27.2 (1997): 103-131.

"Undisciplined Multiplicity: The Relevance of an American Cultural Studies," American Studies 38:2 (Summer 1997): 31-40.

"Dark and Light Mirrors: Science Fictions of a Reinvented Humanity," presented to the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, Birmingham, UK, June 2000.

"The American Renaissance, American Literature, and the Empire of Academia," presented to the American Studies Association, Seattle, WA, November 1998.

"Artificial Intelligence, the Country of the Mind and Blackness in Greg Bear's Queen of Angels: Exploring the Dark," presented to the Society for Literature and Science, Gainesville, FL, November 1998.

"Open Enclosures: The Form of Scientific Utopia in H.G. Wells' Things to Come (1936)," presented to the Society for Utopian Studies, Memphis, TN, October 1997.

"Radical Saganism: Extraterrestrial Contact as Political Narrative in Planetary Science and Science Fiction," presented to the Society for Literature and Science, Pittsburgh, PA, October 1997.

"'twas beauty killed the beast': Gender, Race, and Evolutionary Narrative in King Kong (1933)," presented to the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, University of Hawaii at Manoa, April 1997.

"Annexing the Planets: Race, Gender, & the Conquest of Space in Contemporary Science Fiction," presented to the Science, Technology, and Society Colloquium, The Claremont Colleges, March 1997.

PARTIAL LIST OF AWARDS
Visiting Professor, Cultural Studies, Claremont Graduate University, 1997-98.
Dorothy L. Danforth Compton Fellowship, Brown University, Summer 1993.
Five College Associate, Smith College, 1991-92.
Mendenhall Predoctoral Fellowship, Smith College, 1990-91.