Terry Harpold

Assistant Director

Terry Harpold received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining UF’s Department of English, where he is now Associate Professor, he was a faculty member of the Department of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Associate Director of Tech’s Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center. He is co-founder of UF’s Science Fiction Working Group, and founder and Director of UF’s Imagining Climate Change initiative. His principal areas of research and teaching are science fiction literature and film from the mid-nineteenth century through to the contemporary era – with an emphasis on European sf, especially the work of Jules Verne – and the poetics and ethics of ecological crisis, with an emphasis on intersectional (fully human) and interspecies (more-than-human) approaches to climate equity, justice, and resilience. He has published widely on these subjects in journals and edited collections devoted to science fiction studies and environmental humanities, and is the author of Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008); a 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) ; and a co-editor, with M. Elizabeth Ginway, of the forthcoming Latin America Writes Back: Political and Ecological Crisis in Science Fiction. 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. 

Dr. Harpold’s role in the Astraeus Space Institute is to advance conversation and collaboration across UF’s space communities in the sciences, humanities, and the arts, working on the premise that space exploration, planetary science, and physical cosmology are more than scientific fields of endeavor; they are deeply enmeshed with human ethical, cultural, and imaginative legacies and futures. As Assistant Director, Dr. Harpold will help coordinate intramural and public-facing speaker series and colloquia, interdisciplinary curricular workshops, film series, and grant opportunities to extend the creative range of UF’s space-related engagements.