• Speculative Fiction
• Ecofiction
• Gender and Sexuality
• Race and Ethnicity
• Space/Spatiality
• Economic criticism

I am a doctoral student and a teaching and research assistant at the University of Zurich English Department. My research explores the potential of speculative fiction to challenge and provide possible alternatives to heteropatriarchal and euro- and anthropocentric structures and worldviews and interrogates preconceived notions of genre, authorship, and readership. My PhD project focuses more specifically on how, in response to rising awareness of the complex environmental and social challenges of the moment, recent science fiction is modeling new ways of constituting (post)human identities through relationships with and within various ecologies, including natural environments, urban spaces, and cyber spaces. 

Prior to my current position, I completed my MA at UZH with my thesis focusing on the depictions of female beauty as a precarious form of capital in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, and Tina Fey’s Mean Girls. Before coming to Switzerland, I received a BA in English and a BA in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara, volunteered in Kosovo as part of the U.S. Peace Corps, and engaged in environmental activism and housing justice in California. 

The most recent academic conferences that I have participated in are the SANAS Biennial Conference, which took place in Geneva, CH in November 2024, where I presented a paper entitled “Post-human Figures as Catalysts for More Human(e) Futures in N.K. Jemisin’s ‘Walking Awake’ and ‘Valedictorian’” and the GAPS 34th Annual Conference, which took place in Zürich, CH in May 2024, where I presented a paper entitled “Connecting People and Places for New Paradigms of Healing in Vandana Singh’s ‘Entanglement’”. 

I also published an article in November 2023 entitled “Indigiqueer Reimaginings of Science Fiction” (SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, Vol. 42). 

E.N. Schmoll Full CV