Robert Yeates

My research centers around the relationship between speculative fiction and emerging media technologies, from the late-nineteenth century to the present. My doctoral dissertation looked at representations of ruined future cities in post-apocalyptic science fiction, including chapters on fiction in magazines, radio and film adaptations of literary texts, multimedia franchises based around comics and television series, and digital media such as video games. I am currently working to adapt this dissertation into a monograph. Since completing my dissertation, my research has increasingly focused on twenty-first-century texts, with recent articles looking at how fiction podcasts and webcomics draw on established media and literary genre conventions, as well as the ready access to their fandoms on social media, to creating engaging, immersive story-worlds. In addition to these interests, I am working collaboratively with scholars in adjacent fields, including teaching English as a second language and information studies, to explore how online fan communities around genre fiction can inform research into education and university-community engagement.

The courses I teach at Okayama University incorporate my research interests in American literature and particularly speculative fiction, including study of texts by twentieth-century authors such as Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy, Octavia E. Butler, and Toni Morrison. Recurring themes in these courses include the development of the short story in America, and particularly how the short story form has adapted and/or drawn from other forms such as graphic narratives, audio fiction, and film; modernity and the urban experience; and the histories of race and identity in America. Material culture is also a key component in these classes, with my aim being to introduce students to range of ways of reading which go beyond the words on the page. These include study of the bibliographic features of digitized resources, mass-produced objects, and unique archival materials, contextualizing written texts within a larger history of media technology. Through study of these areas, students are encouraged to approach literary analysis with an openness to interdisciplinary methods and to allow their research to be informed by adjacent fields, creating opportunity for innovative connections and interpretations.