Albert Wendland

Albert Wendland is an associate professor in the English Department at Seton Hill College in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. He has taught courses in both the reading and writing of science fiction and fantasy, the graphic novel, film studies, Shakespeare, survey British Literature, writers of the American West, Romanticism, the Freshman and Senior Seminars of the core curriculum, and he has given lectures in such diverse topics as the fall of the Roman Empire, the art of the Romantic period, science and art in the decade after World War I, astronomy, and American geology. At Seton Hill he was the Chair of the English Department for eight years, Coordinator of Faculty Development, and he led a seminar for five years in methods of teaching and instruction. He is also interested in the writers of the American West, graphic novels and visual description in literature, film history and analysis, astronomy, geology, painting, photography and writing poetry (he has had several peoms published in the literary magazine of Seton Hill).

His first and major interest, however, has always been science fiction. He majored in both Physics and English at Carnegie-Mellon University, an attempt to straddle both parts of science and fiction. His Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Pittsburgh was a critical study of science fiction, which was later published as 'Science, Myth and the Fictional Creation of Alien Worlds'. He has written a science fiction novel, has given workshops in the writing of SF and on "what's new" in the genre to groups at local libraries, and slide-presentations on science fiction illustration and on the art of such graphic SF creators as Phillippe Druillet. He has presented papers at conferences for the Science Fiction Research Association and the International Association for the Fantastic in Art on critical approaches to science fiction, reader-response theory in studying SF, the novels of Andre Norton, and he's currently preparing a paper on the teaching of graphic novels. (And he still talks about writing science-fiction short stories, but never seems to get around to it.)

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