Alexis Lothian

About

Alexis Lothian is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in queer and feminist media and cultural studies. Her research centers on speculative fiction, digital media, and online fandom, with a focus on their intersections with gender, race, and disability justice. She authored the book 'Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility,' published in 2018 by NYU Press, which explores alternative futures envisioned by feminists, queers, and people of color in Britain and America, analyzing how these narratives challenge dominant historical and political discourses. Lothian also creates video remixes related to her work, including 'This is a Low: Old Futures in the Age of Brexit.' Currently, she is working on two book projects: a co-authored book on slash fan fiction and the politics of fantasy, and a monograph examining the development of critical and social justice-oriented fan cultures in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Her extensive publications address the relationship between feminist and queer knowledge production and media fans' creative practices, emphasizing digital infrastructure, racial justice, and critical fandom. As an associate professor at The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, she contributes to academic discourse on digital humanities, media studies, and social justice through her research, teaching, and editorial work.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Computer Science
• Psychoanalysis
• Philosophy
• Law
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility

  2018-09-25 · 146 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Finalist, 2019 Locus Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Locus Science Fiction FoundationTraverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital mediaOld Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transforming the present. Lothian shows how queer possibil…

  DOI

• An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure

  Transformative Works and Cultures · 2021 · 117 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  In summer 2020, when the language of racial reckoning entered US and transnational public spheres following the murder of George Floyd, the contradictions of fandom's long-standing claims to progressive politics became sharply visible. An open letter with specific demands asking the fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) to address the issue of racist content in the archive circulated widely. After offering a brief history of critiques of fannish racism, we turn to the specifics of AO3, t…

  PublisherDOI

• Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016

  Debates in the digital humanities · 2016-06-01 · 44 citations

  book

  Pairing full-length scholarly essays with shorter pieces drawn from scholarly blogs and conference presentations, as well as commissioned interviews and position statements, *Debates in the Digital Humanities* 2016 reveals a dynamic view of a field in negotiation with its identity, methods, and reach.

  PublisherDOI

• Old Futures

  New York University Press eBooks · 2019-05-23 · 38 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Finalist, 2019 Locus Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media Old Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transforming the present. Lothian shows how queer possib…

  PublisherDOI

• From Transformative Works to #transformDH: Digital Humanities as (Critical) Fandom

  American Quarterly · 2018-01-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Digital humanities is an amorphous and contested field, network, discourse, or discipline. This essay argues that it is best understood as a fandom—and that there is much to learn from attending to processes and practices of scholarly field formation through lenses developed by fan theorists, practitioners, and scholars. This approach positions digital humanities as operating in excess of institutional logics, treating the affects and conflicts that accompany discussions of digital scholarship a…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kristina Busse

  4 shared

• Moya Bailey

  3 shared

• Nico Carpentier

  Charles University

  3 shared

• Amanda Phillips

  3 shared

• Henry Jenkins

  3 shared

• Francesca Coppa

  2 shared

• Tisha Turk

  2 shared

• Natalie Fenton

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Southern California

Awards & honors

• Motherboard of the Otherwise Award