Dr. Stephen Schryer

Biography

Stephen Schryer is a professor at the University of New Brunswick, specializing in 20th/21st century American literature, science fiction, African American literature, and literary theory. His current book project, tentatively titled 'Neoliberal Science Fictions,' links the emergence of Golden Age science fiction to neoliberal theory as it developed in the 1940s and 1950s. He examines how speculative writers like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Judith Merril, and George Schuyler functioned as amateur economists, while also exploring the influence of science fiction tropes on economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. Schryer is also the author of several critical works, including 'National Review’s Literary Network: Conservative Circuits' published by Oxford University Press in 2024, 'Maximum Feasible Participation: American Literature and the War on Poverty' published by Stanford University Press in 2018, and 'Fantasies of the New Class' published by Columbia University Press in 2011. His essays have appeared in prominent journals such as PMLA, Post-45, Modernism/modernity, Twentieth-Century Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Arizona Quarterly, and Los Angeles Review Books. He supervises theses on American literature, with a particular focus on American fiction from the 1930s to the present, and is a current member of the Graduate Academic Unit at the university.

Research Interests