Members of the Executive Board include five elected officers: President, First Vice-President, Second Vice-President, Treasurer, and Public Information Officer.
Other officers are ex officio or are appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the other elected officers. You can find the Conference Division Heads in the conference section of our site.
President
Sydney Duncan
Frostburg State University, Frostburg, Maryland, USA
Sydney Duncan is an assistant professor of English at Frostburg State University. She is active in science fiction and fantasy scholarship and fandom. She has an M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Ph.D. from the University of Alabama.
- <sduncan AT frostburg.edu>
First Vice-President
Dale Knickerbocker
Second Vice-President
Karen Burnham
NASA, Houston, Texas, USA
Karen Burnham is an electrical engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Throughout the years she has also become involved in the field of science fiction literature, as a reviewer, editor, and independent scholar. She edits the blog portion of the Locus Magazine website and appears in the Divers Hands review column there. She has published reviews in Strange Horizons, SFSignal, and Cascadia Subduction Zone, among other venues. A book-length critical study on the work of Greg Egan is expected out from University of Illinois Press in 2014.
- <karen.burnham AT gmail.com>
Treasurer
William Clemente
Peru State College, Peru, Nebraska, USA
Bill Clemente is a professor of English at Peru State College where he has taught a variety of courses for the past eighteen years, from Non-western Literature to the History of the English Language. Bill presently serves his second term as Treasurer for the IAFA. A fan of SF for fifty years, Bill experiments this spring 2010 with an on-line SF Literature and Film class. Bill enjoys bird watching and photography and serves as “unofficial official” photographer for a variety of organizations.
- <bclemente AT mac.com>
Public Information Officer
Stacie Hanes
Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA
Stacie Hanes’s dissertation, “The Sense and Sensibility of the Nineteenth-Century Fantastic,” explores the psychology of the fantastic as a didactic medium in the work of Mary Shelley, Christina Rossetti, and Bram Stoker. Her research interests lie in nineteenth-century literature, as well as contemporary fantastic literature and Jane Austen. She has previously served the IAFA as a Division Head and on the Executive Board as Membership & Registration Coordinator. She has published several book chapters on the work of British fantasy author Terry Pratchett, and numerous encyclopedia articles on a variety of subjects within her research interests. Alongside her research interests, Hanes particularly enjoys teaching composition in small, computer-centered classes where she can play to her strengths: one-on-one communication and computer use.
- <shanes1 AT kent.edu>
Immediate Past President
Jim Casey
High Point University, High Point, North Carolina, USA
Jim Casey is an Assistant Professor at High Point University in North Carolina. He has an MA from the University of North Texas, an MPhil from the University of Glasgow, and a PhD from the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama, where he was the first Strode Exchange Scholar to study at The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. Although primarily a Shakespearean, he has published on such diverse topics as fantasy, early modern poetry, textual theory, performance theory, postmodern theory, comics, masculinity, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Battlestar Galactica.
- <jcasey AT highpoint.edu>
Editor of the JFA
Brian Attebery
Idaho State University, Pocatello, Idaho, USA
Brian Attebery is editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and Professor of English at Idaho State University. His dissertation in American Civilization at Brown University became his first book, The Fantasy in Tradition in American Literature. He has since published Strategies of Fantasy and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction and was co-editor, with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler, of The Norton Book of Science Fiction. He was a Fulbright lecturer at Uppsala University in 1988, and has been honored for his scholarship by Idaho State University, the Science Fiction Research Association, the Idaho Humanities Council, and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
- <attebria AT isu.edu>
Membership & Registration Coordinator
Valorie Ebert
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, USA
Valorie Ebert holds an M.A. in Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Her research focuses on hope in science fiction dystopias, especially Cold War sf. Her other scholarly interests include eco-criticism and animal studies.
- <vebert AT my.fau.edu>
Student Caucus Representatives
Liz Lundberg and Daryl Richot
- < AT gmail.com>
Technical Officers
Michael A. Smith
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Michael Smith is a lecturer in Information Technology Management in the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech. He holds the BS in Computer Science, the MS in Management and the PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research has appeared in journals including the Communications of the ACM, the Journal of MIS, The European Journal of Operations and Production Management, Database and Information & Management. He has been an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy since he bought a copy of Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade at a department store in Atlanta in the summer of 1973. With pretensions of a literary nature, he survived OSC’s Literary Bootcamp in 2011.
- <anarresti AT gmail.com>
Curtis Potterveld
Independent Scholar
Curtis Potterveld holds a BS in Physics and a MS in Astrophysics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a MS in Aerospace Engineering from Arizona State University. He works currently for Boeing Space Operations as a systems engineer on the Commercial Crew Transportation System. Curtis is also pursuing a PhD in systems engineering at Steven’s Institute of Technology. Prior to working for Boeing he taught at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and worked at Microcosm Inc. He acquired is passion for engineering from reading and watching science fiction and fantasy as child and he has been hooked on it ever since.
- <curtis.potterveld AT gmail.com>
Sean Nixon
Conference On-Site A/V Coordinator
Sean Nixon is a graduate student at the University of Colorado finishing his PhD in Applied Mathematics. His research interests include Nonlinear Wave, Asymptotic Methods/Perturbation Theory, and nonlinear optics. He’s been attending the ICFA since 2000 and refused to give it up just because he was a mathematician.
- <sean.d.nixon AT gmail.com>
Len Hatfield (consultant)
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA
Len is a former president of the IAFA. Besides the fantastic in literature, his interests include literary theory, postmodernism, and humanities computing.
Awards Director
Gary K. Wolfe
Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Gary K. Wolfe has long been involved in literary scholarship and criticism, with a particular focus on the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In addition to having written several books on these topics, he’s been a monthly book review columnist for LOCUS magazine since 1992. Over the years, Gary has contributed more than two hundred essays to academic journals, reference works, encyclopedias, and magazines. Among the more recent are essays on authors Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, Jane Yolen, Joanna Russ, and Ray Bradbury.
- <gwolfe AT roosevelt.edu>
Conference Chair
Donald E. Morse
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA
University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary
Donald E. Morse is University Professor of American, Irish, and English literature, University of Debrecen, Hungary and Emeritus Professor of English and Rhetoric, Oakland University, Michigan. He has been twice Fulbright Professor (1987–1989, 1991–1993) and Soros Professor (1990, 1996–1997), University of Debrecen, Visiting Professor at the Centre for Transatlantic Studies, Maastricht and Partium University, Nagyvárad, Romania. He has written and/or edited 15 books. Among his latest are The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American (2003), The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock with Kálmán Matolcsy (2011), Brian Friel’s Dramatic Artistry (2006), and Anatomy of Science Fiction (2006). He is also co-author of Worlds Visible and Invisible (1994), the editor of The Delegated Intellect: Emersonian Essays on Literature, Art, and Science (1995) and The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts (1987). With the Hungarian scholar, Csilla Bertha, he co-edited A Small Nation’s Contribution to the World (1993), More Real than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts (1991), and The Celebration of the Fantastic (1992), and published translations of contemporary Hungarian plays into English, Silenced Voices: Transylvanian-Hungarian Plays for which he received a Rockefeller Study Fellowship. Their translation of The Heretic received its World Premiere at ICFA. His more than one hundred scholarly essays have appeared in a English and American Studies. Since 1984 he has served as the Conference Chair of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (USA) and for the past 15 years has hosted Bloomsday in Detroit. The University of Debrecen awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in recognition of his international scholarship and his service to Hungarian higher education. In 2007 the Hungarian Society for the Study of English awarded him the László Országh Medal, the first non-Hungarian to receive the award.
- <Donaldcsilla AT yahoo.com>
Conference Publications Officer
Judith Collins
Campbellsville University, Campbellsville, Kentucky, USA
Judith Collins is Associate Professor of English at Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Kentucky. She earned her M.A. at Florida Atlantic University and her Ph.D. in Modern American literature at the University of Kentucky. She publishes little and hasn’t been listed as an official ICFA presenter in years, but she attended the very first ICFA in 1980, and like her father before her, she has the OCD necessary for page layout.
- <jarcm AT insightbb.com>
Book Exhibits and Sales Director
David Hartwell
New York, New York, USA
David Hartwell holds a Ph.D. in comparative medieval literature. He is an American editor of science fiction and fantasy and the publisher of numerous anthologies. He founded the Timescape imprint at Pocket and is currently a senior editor at Tor/Forge. He chairs the board of directors of the World Fantasy Convention and, with Gordon Van Gelder, is the administrator of the Philip K. Dick Award.
- <dgh AT panix.com>
Dell Magazines Award Director
Rick Wilber
University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA
Rick Wilber is a journalism and mass-media professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He has published two novels, several short-story collections, a memoir, and several college textbooks on writing, editing and mass-media studies for some of the world’s largest publishers. Rick has published more than fifty short stories and a similar number of poems in magazines and anthologies ranging from Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine and Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine to the often reprinted Alien Sex anthology and many others. Most recently, he is the editor of “Future Media” (Tachyon, 2011), a collection of reprinted classic works of fiction and non-fiction.
- <rickwilber AT tampabay.rr.com>
