Terry Harpold is Associate Professor of English. His research and teaching are focused on the poetics and ethics of environmental transformation and climate change, with an emphasis on intersectional (human) and interspecies (more than human) approaches to environmental justice, equity, and resilience. He is also a scholar of science fiction literature and film from the mid-nineteenth century through to the contemporary era. A co-founder of UF’s Science Fiction Working Group, and founder and Director of UF’s Imagining Climate Change initiative, he is the Assistant Director for Humanities Research of UF’s Astraeus Space Institute.
He is the author of Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008); and co-editor, with Daniel Compère and Volker Dehs, of Collectionner l’Extraordinaire, sonder l’Ailleurs. Essais sur Jules Verne en hommage à Jean-Michel Margot (2015). Recent publications by Harpold have appeared in journals such as Ecozon@, Épistémocritique, Galaxies, Science Fiction Studies, and Verniana; and in edited collections such as Los viajes extraordinarios de Jules Verne (2018), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019), EcoComix: Essays on the Environment in Comics and Graphic Novels (2020), Jules Verne Lives! Essays on His Works and Legacy (2023), An Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators (2024), and Teaching Science Fiction in the Literature Classroom (2025).
He is working on three book-length projects: an edited collection of essays, Plant Life: Exploring Vegetal Worlds in the Harn Museum Collection, a collection of essays co-edited with M. Elizabeth Ginway, Latin America Writes Back: Political and Ecological Crisis in Science Fiction, and a single-author monograph, Beware the Blob, on the poetics of “unquiet matter” in contemporary environmental fiction, poetry, and film.