Christopher Leslie
Instructor of Media, Science, and Technology Studies
Academic Advisor for Sustainable Urban Environments and Science and Technology Studies students
Technology, Culture and Society
- Phone: (718) 260-3130
- Email: cleslie@poly.edu
- Location: Dibner Building LC 131
- Website:
Education
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Doctor of Philosophy, English
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Master of Arts, American Studies
Courses Taught
Research Interests
- History of Science and Technology:
- Media and technology in the 20th century
- Interantional communities of the Internet
- History of the race concept
- Social construction of science and technology
- Humanities:
- Digital humanities
- Science fiction and utopian literature
- Literary modernism
Awards + Distinctions
Samuel Eleazar and Rose Tartakow Levinson Prize for an original essay in the intellectual history of technology, Society for the History of Technology, 2011.
Fulbright Grant: Guest professor at the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Univertität Potsdam, Germany, 2008-2009.
Robert Adams Day Prize for the best dissertation involving interdisciplinary work, 2007.
Event Participation
Upcoming Presentations and Panels
Convening “Shakespeare and Natural History,” a panel for the Shakespeare 450 conference organized by Société française Shakespeare in Paris in April 2014.
“Blood Factors and the Social Construction of Race in the Twentieth Century: Malaria without Sickle Cell in Southeast Asia.” International Conference on the History of Medicine in Southeast Asia (HOMSEA), Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines: will present in January 2014.
Convening “STS Interventions into Invention, Innovation, and Diffusion for Engineering Education,” a panel for the Society for Social Studies of Science annual conference in San Diego in October 2013.
“The Science of Fictional Species in the Genomic Age,” Writing Worlds – Models of World and Space in the Fantastic, the fourth annual conference of the Association for Research in the Fantastic, Wetzlar, Germany: will present in September 2013.
“Sustainable Innovation in Southeast Asia: Assessing the Legacy of the Appropriate Technology Movement,” APSTSN biennial conference, Knowing, Making, Governing, Tembusu College, National University of Singapore: will present in July 2013.
Convening “Science Fiction and the Social Construction of Science and Technology,” a panel for the 8th annual Science in Public conference at the University of Nottingham in July 2013.
“Walt Whitman and the History of Racial Science.” Whitman North and South Symposium for the Sixth Annual International Walt Whitman Week, Northwestern University: will present in June 2013.
“Competing Histories of the Internet: The Vital Role of International Communities,” International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 9.7 conference on the History of Computing, London: will present in June 2013.
Selected Presentations and Talks
“Remediations of Public Radio: The Broadcasts of War of the Worlds,“ joint Science Fiction Research Association / Eaton Conference, 2013.
“Fantastic Facts: Travel Narratives in 18th Century Proto-Science Fiction,” Remapping Scientific Travels panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference, 2013.
“Quite Safe for Work: The Potential for Counterhegemony in the Use of Social Media,” Marxist Reading Group’s conference “Rethinking Work,” University of Florida, 2013.
“Symbiotic Communication: Disrupting Notions of Alterity in the Wake of the New Wave,” Ethics and Poetics of Genre Literature, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France, 2013.
“Ineffectual Ambassadors of Cold War Science Fiction,” The Ambassadorship of Literature symposium at New York University, 2013.
“U.S. Novels in the Fight against Scientific Racism: Chesnutt, Stein, Fitzgerald, and Du Bois,” G-SEC American Studies Project lecture series, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan, 2013.
“STS Interventions: Technology Transfer Lessons for the Engineering Curriculum,” Multidisciplinary Studies on Sustainable Development conference, Prince of Songkla University, Phuket Campus, Thailand, 2013.
“Gertrude Stein Among the Eugenicists,” New York University’s Colloquium on American Literature and Culture (CALC), 2012.
“The Military-Industrial Complex in the 1960s Novels,” Worlds Out of Joint: Re-Imagining Philip K. Dick, TU Dortmund, Germany, 2012.
“The Social Construction of Race in Pre-Golden Age Science Fiction: Smith and Weinbaum,” Society for Social Studies of Science, 2012.
“CSNET and the Internationalization of the Internet,” Society for the History of Technology, 2012.
“The Continuous Present in the Clinic: Stein’s 3 Lives and The Making of Americans,” European Society for the Study of English, 2012.
“Walter Benjamin and the Stages of Civilization,” Barbarism Revisited conference at Leiden University, 2012.
"Science Fiction and the ARPANet," Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference, 2012.
“Hugo Gernsback's Utopian Radio Citizens of New York in 2660 (or 1911),” New York Institute of Technology’s Modernist Manhattan, 2012.
“‘Come to Paris Where You Can Be Looked After’: Paul Bowles Remediates Gertrude Stein,” Modern Language Association, 2012.
“As We Had Been Thinking: The Memex as Convergence,” Society for the History of Technology, 2011.
“Word Clouds as Deformance: A Study of Stein’s 3 Lives,” Humanities and Technology Association, 2011.
“Translation and Cosmopolitan Science in Hugo Gernsback’s Magazines,” Science Fiction Research Association, 2011.
“Horror and Hybridity: Charles Chesnutt in the Context of Scientific Racism,” American Literature Association, 2011.
“Shakespeare as Natural Historian: Caliban and the Traffic in Monsters,” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, 2010.
“‘Behavior Lawless as Snow-Flakes’: Whitman’s Organicism in a Culture of Teleology,” Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, 2010.
Hometown
Fredonia, NY
Affiliations
- Modern Language Association
- Society for the History of Technology
- Science Fiction Research Association
General / Collaborative Research
"Text and Technology" with Lisa Gitelman, a collaborative teaching grant from Humanities Initiative at NYU, 2013-2014.
Journal Articles
“As We Should Have Thought: The Intellectual Legacy of the Memex,” under consideration by Technology and Culture.
“Half Fish, Half Monster: Shakespeare’s Caliban and the Performance of Natural History,” guest contribution accepted by Forum 16 (2013): Un/Natural Histories.
“Scholarly Humanities Websites: Silos to Withstand a Siege,” Romance Studies Journal (2012): 103-124.
“‘Fighting an Unseen Enemy’: The Infectious Paradigm in the Conquest of Pellagra,” Journal of Medical Humanities 23 (Winter 2002), 187–202.
Other Publications
Review of Media Clusters: Spatial Agglomeration and Content Capabilities, Science and Public Policy, in press.
"Literature and Ethnic Diversity," "Science and Technology," "History of and How the Census Works," and " Science and Technology," under consideration by SAGE Publications for Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia.
“Aesthetic Tourists: The Sheltering Sky’s Critique of Modernism,” forthcoming in Paul Bowles: The New Generation by Rodopi.
“Sequencing the Genome, Naturalising Race.” Review essay of Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, edited by Barbara A. Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson; What’s the Use of Race?: Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference, edited by Ian Whitmarsh and David S. Jones, and Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture, edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan, Science as Culture 21.4 (December 2012), forthcoming.
"China and the Internet." Review essay of Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, Susan L. Shirk (ed.), Changing Media, Changing China, and David Kurt Herol and Peter Marolt (eds.), Online Society in China, Media, Culture, and Society 34.8 (November 2012): 1059–63.
"Unstable Reality in the Age of Big Science: The Counterhegemonic Strategies of Jack Vance, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick," Batı Edebiyatında İdeoloji (Ideology in Western Literature). Ertuğrul İşler, et al., eds. İzmir: Ata Matbaası, August.
"Decolonizing the Internet" (review essay of Cyrus Farivar, The Internet of Elsewhere: The Emergent Effects of a Wired World, Jaffer Sheyholislami, Kurdish Identity, Discourse, and New Media, and Miriyam Aouragh, Palestine Online: Transnationalism, Communications and the Reinvention of Identity), Global Media and Communication 8.1 (April 2012): 81-8.
“Isaac Asimov: I, Robot.” The Literary Encyclopedia. April 2012. http://www.litencyc.com.
Review of Science Fiction and Computing: Essays on Interlinked Domains. SFRA Review 300 (Spring 2012): 16-17.
“The Rise of the Confident Reader.” Review essay in American Quarterly, 63.4 (December 2011).
Review Essay: The Master Switch, In the Plex and The Net Delusion for the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62.12 (December 2011): 2540–2545. (preprint)
“Metacognition through Group Practice in New Media,” Media/Culture 9:2 (May 2006).
“Writing Self-Assessment for First-Year Engineering Students: Initial Findings,” Proceedings of the 2004 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, June 2004. With Elisa Linksy and Gunter Georgi.
Biography
Christopher Leslie is codirector of the Science and Technology Studies program and is the academic advisor for students in that major and in Sustainable Urban Environments. He teaches courses in the history of new media, the history of science, multicultural U.S. literature, and science fiction.
Before coming to Poly, Dr. Leslie worked as an editor at a management services consulting firm and taught at John Jay College and Hunter College. He began teaching at Poly in the fall of 2001, and in 2006 he designed the Science and Technology Studies major with Professor Jonathan Bain. In 2007, he took his doctorate from the City University of New York Graduate Center in English with a focus on American Studies. He is currently preparing a book manuscript based on his dissertation, tentatively titled From Hyperspace to Hypertext: Social Construction of Science and Technology in Science Fiction.