About

Image of a woman with shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, and glasses. She wears a white shirt and black sweater, has a necklace shaped like a planet, and a tattoo is visible on her chest. (It's an illustration of Zeno's arrow paradox rendered in typography.)

Scholarship

Kristen Koopman joined the Virginia Tech Department of Science, Technology, and Society in 2013 and received her M.S. in 2015. Her work lies at the intersection of STS, media studies, and science fiction studies. She has written and presented on topics from Heinlein to Welcome to Night Vale. Lying at the intersection of STS, media studies, cultural studies, and science fiction studies, her dissertation focuses on how values in science operate in nonprofessional contexts–specifically, in the science fiction community.

Her dissertation analyzes Hugo Award-nominated novels between 2008-2012 to see how scientific values operate in the texts, community reviews, and authorial experiences. It is a mixed-methods project that uses close reading, discourse analysis, and ethnographic interviews.

Creative Writing

As a huge nerd, Kristen writes about anything and everything. Her favorite topics include interrogations of personhood and value, the nature of will and agency, tensions between identity and society, and dragons vs. spaceships.

Kristen is a proud alum of several writing workshops, from the University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop to the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s Short Fiction Workshop (and Repeat Offenders). She highly recommends both.