Introduction Blog

Good Day everyone! My name is Christina Stiglianese (her/she). I am an SR at Stony Brook University, and I will be graduating this December with my Bachelor’s in English and going on to complete my LSATs and attend Law School. This is my second course with Professor Hautsch, I took Fan Fiction a few semesters ago, and I absolutely loved it! We all are familiar with fiction from our favorite authors and movie writers, but to experience the world of fan fiction the way Professor Hautsch laid it out before the class was an experience all its own. I am very excited to take this course with Professor Hautsch; and I selected this course because she is a fantastic professor, and she made learning during the summer fun and helped me learn more about the world of science fiction. I am eager to see what she teaches this semester! In addition to being a student, I am a wife and a mother to two handsome boys, who graduated this year, my oldest from middle school and my youngest from kindergarten. Because of the health climate these last two years, vacation plans have been more or less null and void; however, this year, my husband and I are taking our two graduates and my niece to Florida for an entire week in July. My family and I haven’t been back to Florida in about five years (we vacation to different places every year), so going back to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Islands of Adventure at Universal Studios is one of the highlights of this year!

I look forward to getting to know all of you! Have a great semester!

Welcome!

Hello everyone, 

Welcome to EGL 309: CogSci and SciFi on the Screen! Throughout the course of our class, we will be using this blog as space for you to post your weekly reflections and discoveries as you draw connections between our course VoiceThread lectures and the films we are watching. I am really looking forward to reading your work as we dig into research in cognitive science and philosophy and science fiction representations of the mind.Image of a purplish brain suspended in a vat. Wires are hooked up to the brain, and on either side of the vat are more wires and tubes. In the background, there are computer motherboards and additional technology on the walls.

So, a little bit about me.

My name is Jessica Hautsch (she/her). I graduated this May from Stony Brook with a PhD in English. My dissertation, titled Thinking Through Fandom: Mind, Body, and Feeling in the Reception and Creation Practices of Fan Communities, draws on research and theories in the cognitive sciences to understand the complex cognitive work that fans are in and through fanworks. Although we are not researching fandom in this class (shout out to students who took EGL 303: Fanfiction as Literature with me last summer), a lot of the cognitive science research that we will be discussing is featured in my diss. These can be some tricky idea to wrap your mind around, so please let me know if you want to further discuss any of the theories or research that I discuss in my lectures. I love talking about this stuff. In Defense of Fanfiction: Authors as Fanfic Writers – The Mindful RamblerOutside of my academic work, I am a long distance runner, a cat mum, and a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast. I will be also be enjoying Emo Girl Summer, as a couple of friends and I are going to Taking Back Sunday, Dashboard Confessional, My Chemical Romance, and Panic! At the Disco concerts.

Text reading "Emo for life"