Fabienne Collignon

I joined the School of English at the University of Sheffield in 2012 as a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature. I completed my PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2009 where I held a short-term post, and I also obtained a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.

My research focuses on American techno-culture, specifically the Cold War and Cold War weapons systems; genre fiction/film; theories of technology; the poetics of space.

My first monograph, Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014 and focuses on the technological unconscious of the American Cold War. It specifically explores the recurring figures and fantasies of the conflict; the fictions of total security; gadget love; closed, freezing worlds. The book’s focal point is Thomas Pynchon’s, Gravity’s Rainbow, which has inspired my study’s attention to secret affinities.

My next research project will focus on weird war machines and the insectile.

Relevant publications

• Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2014)

• Cold-Pac Politics: Ubik’s Cold War Imaginary, in Alexander Dunst and Stefan Schlensag (eds), Future Matters: The Persistence of Philip K. Dick (Palgrave, forthcoming).

• Soft Machines, in Mariangela Palladino and John Miller (eds), The Globalization of Space (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014).

• ‘The Ballistic Flight of an Automatic Duck’. Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon Vol. 1, No. 2 (November 2012).

• ‘Silo Psychosis’, C-Theory. Special Issue: In the Name of Security. April 2011.