Shaoni C. White

Shaoni C. White's picture
Voorhies 318
Office Hours
Due to construction, my office hours are by appointment over Zoom. Email me to set up a time! (If you're a student in my class, you can access the class signup link via Canvas.)

Biography: 

Shaoni C. White is a PhD student in Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. Their dissertation traces the joint emergence of speculation, colonialism, and capitalism. Spanning 1638 to 2015, the dissertation argues that speculative media was originally born as a method for imagining a newly expanded and interconnected global economy shaped by colonialism and transcontinental contact. 

Research interests:

  • Science fiction/SF
  • The global Anglophone
  • Collage and collage poetics
  • New media and media history
  • Queer and trans theory
  • Black studies

Peer-reviewed publications:

  • "Death, History, and the Time Loop: The Subject/Object Relation in Vandana Singh’s 'Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra.'" Extrapolation, vol. 65, no. 2 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.13
  • “Race, Gender, and the Separation of Voice and Body in the Audio Drama Podcast.” Studies in Popular Culture, issue 45, vol. 1-2 (2024). 

Shaoni also writes speculative fiction and poetry. Their work has appeared in Lightspeed, Uncanny, F&SF, and other magazines, and they have written and edited scripts for audio drama podcasts. Their fiction was included in The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, ed. Michael Kelly, 2025. For links and information about their non-academic work, see shaonicwhite.com.

Conference presentations:

  • “Science Fiction as Excess: Surplus Materiality and Black Empire,” PAMLA (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association), 22 November 2025.
  • "A 'Change of Sex': The Eighteenth-Century It-Narrative and Contemporary Science Fiction," SFRA (Science Fiction Research Association), 1 August 2025
  • "American Science Fiction Through Other Continents," ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association), Seminar on Rebooting World SF, 30 May 2025
  • "Fragmentation Techniques: Web Weaves, Ecology, and The Shared History of Hypertext and Scrapbooking," SLSA (Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts), 9 November 2024
  • "Villainous Play: Forbidden Rulesets and Queer Spacetime," Connections 2024, 26 April 2024
  • “Web Weaves: Annihilation’s Readers in a More-Than-Human Media Ecology,” International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science, 10 April 2024

Teaching:

  • UWP 1: Introduction to Academic Literacies - Associate Instructor (Instructor of Record)
  • STS/CDM 151: Media Theory - Teaching Assistant
  • CDM/STS/ENL 172: Videogames and Culture - Teaching Assistant
  • ENL 10C: English Literatures 1900 to the present - Teaching Assistant

Education:

PhD, University of California, Davis, 2023 - present

BA (High Honors), Swarthmore College, 2021