Hi, I'm Sophia! I am a fourth year PhD candidate at ֱ. After completing my comprehensive field exams in Modern Popular Culture in the fall of 2022, and my special topic presentation in the spring of 2023, I have turned my attention towards my dissertation project. Originating from a love for fantasy and SF and interest in religious studies, the project questions how authors of the 20th century sought to understand and rationalize modernity in new story-worlds of their own creation, often through the creation of what I call story-religions.
See my personal website and blog here:
Guest lectures
"Origins and Evolution of Fantasy Literature." ֱ ENGL 273 Literature and the Fantastic, Guest Lecture. February 2025.
“Literary Worldbuilding in Frank Herbert’s Dune.” Queen’s University GEOL 290 Worldbuilding, Guest Lecture. February 2024.
“The Sublime in James Thomson’s Spring” Queen’s University ENGL 330 Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature, Guest Lecture, March 2022.
Publications
"That which is believed in, Is.: Frank Herbert's Dune and Alternate Divine Imaginations." Critical Insights in Science Fiction: Exploring Posthumanism, Alternate Realities, and Cyberculture. Springer Nature. Forthcoming 2025.
“Deconstructing Oppressive Structures: Three Non-Conforming Female Figures in Canadian Drama,” University of Saskatchewan Undergraduate Research Journal, Vol.7, No. 2, 2021.
Other refereed contributions
"Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it:” Dune and Pedagogical Potential," Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) Annual Conference, June 2024, Montreal. (Paper accepted before conference cancellation).
“Healing Backwards: Heather Love’s Feeling Backwards, Samuel Delany’s Empire Star and Textual Queer Temporality,” Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) Annual Conference, May 2023, Toronto.
"Stubborn Hope in Tolkien's "The Music of the Ainur." ֱ Department of English Graduate STP, May 2023, Kingston.
“Imagining New Divinities in 20th Century Fantasy and Science Fiction: Tolkien’s Silmarillion,” Midwest Popular Culture Association, Graduate Conference, March 2023.
“Samuel Delany’s Empire Star & Textual Queer Temporality,” EGSS Incomplete (Eco)Systems Conference, March 2023, Université de Montréal.
“Seeking Transcendence and Immortality through Consciousness and Memory in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,” Queen’s University, Graduate English Society Works in Progress Conference, March 2021.
“‘can’t be known except in the words of its making:’ Denise Levertov’s Balance of Symbolic and Material Action in ‘Making Peace,’” University of Saskatchewan, Department of English Honours Colloquium, February 2020.
In development
Untitled Victorian Fantasy Reader. With Dr. Brooke Cameron and Nikta Sadati. Peter Lang.
Sharday C. Mosurinjohn (School of Religion)
Imagining New Divinities in 20th Century Speculative Fiction.
My doctoral project considers how authors of speculative fiction in the twentieth-century created new religions in their story-worlds in response to upheavals and anxieties of modernity. I demonstrate how authors make subtle or significant deviations from the doctrines or practices of traditional expressions of religion—predominantly normative western Christianity—and read these changes as unspoken critiques of the old institutions.
In a letter dated 6 May 1944, J.R.R. Tolkien urges his son Christopher to pick up writing as a means of expelling the evil he witnesses as a pilot in the Royal Air Force: “I sense amongst all your pains…the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering. In my case it generated Morgoth” (Letters). In the seminal study The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey positions Tolkien alongside other soldiers-turned-writers (Orwell, Golding, and Vonnegut), who used the make-believe worlds of fantasy and science fiction to respond to the modern crises of Western civilization. Shippey’s allegorical framing is widely accepted, however, he leaves a critical question unanswered that my project directly fulfills: Why did they have “to write fantasy, or science fiction, if they had such an evidently realistic, serious, non-escapist, contemporary theme? No answer has been agreed, and the question has not often even been put.” By drawing together Tolkien’s cosmology in The Lord of the Rings (1954-5), Herbert’s consideration of messiah figures and Indigenous stewardship of land in the Dune series (1965-85), and Le Guin and Russ’s veritable explosions of generic convention alongside gender expectations under patriarchy and literary history in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Female Man (1976), my project exposes the ways in which SF and fantasy authors created opportunities for their readers to process—logically and emotionally—the sweeping political, social, and spiritual changes of modernity.
