Claire Curtis

Claire Curtis

Professor of Political Science

Education

Ph.D., M.A., Johns Hopkins University
A.B., Bowdoin College

Research Interests

Professor Curtis uses fiction, utopian, dystopian, postapocalyptic and recently climate fiction as an experimental space to explore theories of justice. These kinds of works of fiction illustrate both the particular concerns the authors have about the condition of our world and imagine new ways of living together. Postapocalyptic and some climate fictions offer ways of thinking about the starting over narrative.  Twentieth century novels are more likely to reflect the ideas of the social contract expressed by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau and contemporary theorists like John Rawls. More recent imaginings of life after the end (including some recent climate fiction) reflect different understandings of the content of justice. Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach captures much of what these novelists present as ways of living together. Utopian and dystopian fiction, both criticizes the societies in which the authors are writing and offer (more robustly for utopian authors) hopeful and potentially radically better ways of living. These intentional constructions of better and worse worlds offer up a window into historic and contemporary attitudes.

 Courses Taught

  • POLI 150, Introduction to Political Thought
  • POLI 292, Topics in Gender, Theory and Law
  • POLI 390, Contemporary Liberalism
  • POLI 391, Utopia/Dystopia

 Selected Publications

  • Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: “We’ll not go home again.” Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010
  • “Postapocalyptic Fiction as a Space for Civic Love” English Studies in Africa. 58.2 (2015), 4-14.
  • “Utopian Possibilities: Disability, Norms and Eugenics in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. 9.1 (2015), 19-33.
  • “Standards of Justice for Human Being and Doing in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312and C. S. Friedman’s This Alien Shore” Open Library of Humanities, 3(2): 6 (2017), pp. 1–30
  • “The Catastrophic End-Games of Young Adult Literature” for Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture, Ed John Hay. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
  • “Eugenics and Utopia” for Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literature, Eds Peter Marks, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Fatima Viera, Palgrave MacMillan, (2022)
  • "ParableSeries (1993—1998): Octavia E. Butler" for The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics, Ed. Bryan Santin, Cambridge University Press (2023)