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.

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. Outside 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.