Foretelling Technologies: Science Fictions and Speculative Futures | USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study

Feb 25 2026

When: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Where: Harman Academy for Polymathic Study, DML 241
Event Type: Polymathic Pizza

RSVP Required

RSVP By: Tue, 02/24/2026

Event Details

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining. Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything. ~ Octavia E. Butler

From the creature in Frankenstein to the clones of Never Let me Go, and the dual identities of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to the single self in Pluribus, science fiction has always invited us to “imagine if you can” a world that is like ours but not quite. Or not yet. We enter these worlds as curious readers and leave with a better sense of who we are and what we might become because of inevitable advancements (or accidents) in the biomedical sciences and everyday technologies.

While all literature and art introduce us to new perspectives on familiar topics, science fiction shakes us out of our habituated ways of thinking by forcing us to confront our greatest desires and worst fears in strange and often unsettling ways. Octavia Butler employed science fiction as a framework to decenter the powerful and empower the marginalized, presciently spotlight environmental degradation, and critique oppressive systems of race, gender and sexuality. The genre allows us, (like OEB) to explore and critique our past, present, and futures in ways we might not otherwise be able to.

For this Polymathic Pizza session, we will engage Professors Erika Wright and Sharon Lloyd about the role that speculative fiction, particularly science fiction, plays in our histories, daily lives and global politics. We will think about our ethical responsibility to these imagined futures as writers, thinkers, scientists, and humans.

Speaker Information

Speaker

Erika Wright

Assistant Professor of Clinical Medical Education and English

Erika Wright holds a PhD in English from the USC. She has appointments as a Lecturer in the English Department (University Park Campus) and as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medical Education at KSOM and is the Associate Director of the HEAL (Humanities, Ethics, Art, and the Law) and Narrative Medicine MS Programs at USC.

Dr. Wright’s book, Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2016), examines the intersection between medicine and literature, demonstrating how health (as opposed to disease) has had a powerful shaping force on narrative form of the nineteenth century novel, particularly in works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

Wright’s current book project, for which she was awarded a Mayers Fellowship at The Huntington Library, examines the role that confidentiality plays in Victorian law, medicine, and literature. Focusing on works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, M. E. Braddon, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson, this new book project, Be Advised, examines the ways professional advice gets depicted, protected, and transgressed in nineteenth-century novels, as well as how secrecy became so powerfully embedded in narratives of professionalism, and how professionals made ethical use of their privileged knowledge.

She has contributed entries on health and disease to the Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction and published articles on medicine and literature, graduate education, and medical professionalism, and the history of addiction. In addition to teaching courses on the British literature survey, Science Fiction, and Women in Literature for the English Department, Erika brings her expertise in narrative theory and close reading to her Narrative Medicine Master of Science courses and to the workshops she has designed and facilitated for medical students, residents, and fellows at CHLA and KSOM.

Sharon Lloyd

Professor of Philosophy and Law

Professor of Philosophy, Law, and Political Science Sharon Lloyd works in the history of political philosophy, with special attention to the moral and political theory of philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Trained and mentored by John Rawls, one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century, Lloyd’s scholarly interests in political philosophy and its history, contemporary liberalism and liberal feminist philosophy reflect that tutelage. She has particular interest in the moral and political theories of Machiavelli, Mill, Hobbes, Marx, and Rawls.

Lloyd’s work in philosophy has attracted the interest of legal scholars and is often published in law reviews. Lloyd is regarded as an important voice in the current generation of liberal feminists.

Lloyd enjoys teaching in USC’s honors program and general education on such topics as self-identity and moral responsibility, political obligation, and social ethics for earthlings and others through science fiction.