Mullen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

A bit of good news! Just heard word that I've won a R. D. Mullen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from Science Fiction Studies. 

It's small, only up to $3,000, but it'll fund a 10-day research trip to the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at UC Riverside. There, I'll be delving into the archives to uncover anything I can about the "pulp" alliterative revival. I discovered that this was a thing when I was looking at Paul Edwin Zimmer's alliterative poetry (published last November in Mythlore). Zimmer explicitly credited Poul Anderson as well as Tolkien for being his alliterative poetry guru . . . which is interesting cuz I've never heard anyone else mention Anderson as a part of the 20th-century alliterative revival. C. S. Lewis, Auden, and Seamus Heaney are always the people mentioned alongside Tolkien. Even more interestingly, Zimmer also says that he knows (but leaves unnamed) a number of other poets trying to follow in the alliterative footsteps of Anderson and Tolkien. So, my proposal, which the SFS committee apparently liked, is just to delve into pulps and fanzines in the hopes of encountering oodles of new information about this revival.

I'll probably head out in August, I'm thinking. What with the conferences and the trip to Europe, this'll be a helluva busy summer.

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