Conrad Scott holds a PhD from the University of Alberta (English and Film Studies) and an MA from the University of Victoria (English). He is an Individualized Study Tutor for the University of Athabasca’s new “The Ecological Imagination” course, and also an Assistant Lecturer with the University of Alberta. He is honoured to serve as the current Co-President for the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC) and is the Science Fiction Research Association’s (SFRA) Country Rep for Canada. He researches SF and environmental literature, and his current project builds on a study of the interconnection between place, culture, and society in contemporary North American fiction that focuses on environment and dystopia/utopia. His academic writing has appeared in Transmotion, Extrapolation, Paradoxa, The Anthropocene and the Undead, Environmental Philosophy, The Goose, UnderCurrents, Science Fiction Studies, The SFRA Review, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and Canadian Literature, with forthcoming chapters in The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms (2023) and Animals and SF (Palgrave 2023). He is also the author of the poetry collection Waterline Immersion (Frontenac House 2019).
Research interests
environmental humanities
speculative fiction and science fiction
dystopia and utopia
climate futurisms
Indigenous futurisms
contemporary literature
Educational credentials
PhD, University of Alberta (English)
MA, University of Victoria (English)
BA, Thompson Rivers University (English and Math)
Professional affiliations
the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada
the Science Fiction Research Association
the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
Alberro, Heather, Emrah Atasoy, Nora Castle, Rhiannon Firth, and Conrad Scott, eds. Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown: Entangled Futurities. Routledge Environmental Humanities book series (forthcoming 2023).
Atwood, Margaret. Early Writings. Edited by Nora Foster Stovel and Donna Couto, with assistance from Conrad Scott. Sydney, Australia: Juvenilia Press, 2020.
Articles and book chapters
Scott, Conrad. “‘Changing Landscapes’: Ecocritical Dystopianism in Contemporary Indigenous SF Literature.” Transmotion, special issue on Indigeneity and the Anthropocene (II), edited by Martín Premoli and David Carlson, vol. 8, no. 1, 2022, pp. 10-38, https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.979.
Scott, Conrad. “Post-Anthropocenic Undying Futures: The Ecocritical Dystopian Posthuman in Lai’s The Tiger Flu and Bacigalupi’s ‘The People of Sand and Slag.’” The Anthropocene and the Undead, edited by Simon Bacon, 2022, pp. 211-26.
Scott, Conrad. “‘Everything Change’: Ecocritical Dystopianism and Climate Fiction.” Climate Fictions, edited by Alison Sperling, Paradoxa, no. 31, 2019-2020, pp. 403-424, https://paradoxa.com/no-30-climate-fictions-2020/.
Scott, Conrad. “(Indigenous) Place and Time as Formal Strategy: Healing Immanent Crisis in the Dystopias of Eden Robinson and Richard Van Camp.” Extrapolation, special issue on Indigenous Futurism, vol. 57, no. 1-2, 2016, pp. 73-92, https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2016.6.
Scott, Conrad. “The End of the Beginning: Environmental Apocalypse on the Cusp in Scott Fotheringhams The Rest is Silence and Nicolas Dickner’s Apocalypse for Beginners.” UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies, special issue on End Times and Beginnings, vol. 18, 2014, pp. 28-37, https://currents.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/currents/article/view/38543/34967.
Scott, Conrad. Review of David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Environmental Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 1, Spring 2020, pp. 192-95, https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil20201713.
Scott, Conrad. “Dare to Imagine Climates Past and Future.” Review of Dehlia Hannah’s A Year Without a Winter. The Goose, vol. 18, no. 1, Art. 10, 2020, https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss1/10/.
Scott, Conrad. “Imagining Future Change Now.” Review of Shelley Streeby’s Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism. Science Fiction Studies, special issue on the Climate Crisis, edited by Victoria Hollinger and Brent Bellamy, vol. 45, no. 3, 2018, pp. 590-592.
Scott, Conrad. “Striking Sparks in the Darkness.” Review of Carol Daniels’ Bearskin Diary, Jennifer Manuel’s The Heaviness of Things that Float, Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed. Canadian Literature, no. 235, 2018, pp. 138-140, https://canlit.ca/article/striking-sparks-in-the-darkness/.
Scott, Conrad. “City Futurisms: Climate, Environment, and the Immanent Near-Future.” Center for Sustainability (College of Charleston), 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uMgg6zdavI.
“The Mythic Future: An Evening with Dr. Larissa Lai: Author of The Tiger Flu and Iron Goddess of Mercy, Interviewed by Dr. Conrad Scott” (Online, Cappadocia University, Turkey, June 18, 2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7tUMdlwMXY.