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
“‘I Can’t Seem to Go Forward, Therefore I Must Go Back’: Ben Okri’s Anachronistic Utopias.” In Moradewun Adejunmobi and Carli Coetzee (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of African Literature. New York: Routledge. [Forthcoming 2018]
“‘Let Us All Mutate Together’: Cracking the Code in Laing’s Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (Fall 2016).
“The Cybogre Manifesto: Time, Utopia, and Globality in Ngũgĩ’s Wizard of the Crow.”Research in African Literatures 47.1 (Spring 2016).
Specialization Areas
Speculative Fiction and Fantasy
African and Diasporic Literature
Postcolonial Literature and Theory
Utopian Literature
Globalization and Cosmopolitanism