Event Details

Please join us to hear from author, professor, and geographer David Seitz '10 about his new book, A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine, which critically examines the world imagined in Deep Space Nine (DS9), the Star Trek television series that debuted in 1993. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy. Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalized in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different “Trek” offers a critical interpretation of DS9’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, Seitz argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate.

Light refreshments will be available.

Sponsored by: Critical Theory, Geography, Media & Cultural Studies, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies