Rebecca M O Ballard

I am an assistant professor of English at Florida State University, where I research and teach American literature, speculative fiction and film, and environmental humanities. I received my PhD in English from Duke University in the spring of 2016 and held positions as assistant professor of English at Southwestern University from 2020 to 2023 and at Winston-Salem State University from 2016 to 2020. I have also published under the name Rebecca McWilliams Evans.

My book in progress, "Genre Frictions: Structural Violence, Activist Forms, and Contemporary American Fiction," explores how post-1970 U.S. American literature and contemporaneous social movements for environmental and social justice have both been shaped by the representational demands posed by slow, structural, and systemic forms of harm. I trace the development of a formal feature that I call “genre friction”—the politically productive tension that emerges when texts shift between realistic and speculative genres—and show how genre experimentation allows minoritized writers to respond to the same social issues and representational pressures as contemporaneous activism. An article drawn from the fifth chapter of this project was published in American Literature in 2021.

I have also begun work on three future projects: one reading adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha’s powerful conception of “visionary fiction” as a way to rethink the concrete political potential of literature in the context of the “post-critical” turn; the other addressing the environmental affects and politics offered by Afrofuturist fiction and film; and a third on the representation of various forms of media in Anthropocene novels, and what they might reveal about the state of the literary in contemporary culture. Meanwhile, my work on contemporary fiction and environmental humanities has appeared in ASAP/Journal, Science Fiction Studies, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, An Ecotopian Lexicon, and Women's Studies Quarterly, and is forthcoming in The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook (MIT/Goldsmiths), and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. I have also contributed review essays to American Literature and Public Books and write regularly for the SF section of the Los Angeles Review of Books.